Gene Simmons Destroyer Costume

Step 10 Dragon Head Boots

Gene’s real boots are plain black seven-inch platforms, with a vacuformed plastic dragon head shell attached to the platform sole with screws. I don’t have a vacuform machine, and for some reason my wife refused to let me put our son on humongously tall platform boots – Something about “falling” and “breaking his head”, or some such craziness…. OW! Stop hitting me!

Anyway, due to my lovely and intelligent wife’s totally valid and well-considered concerns, real platform boots were off the table. I would have to get creative. I didn’t want the dragons to have itty-bitty short teeth due to the low soles, so the obvious solution was to build a false platform shell. My son’s actual foot would be inside the platform instead of on top of it, giving us the look of high soles and the safety of regular soles at the same time.
We went to Goodwill and found a pair of zip-up boots with enough sole thickness in front to attach things to ( ¾ inch), and enough heel to add just a bit of height (2 ½ inches).
Back at home, I started looking around for materials to make the platform shells, and eventually settled on old gallon milk jugs from the recycle bin.
I cut a four-inch-wide strip from around the center of the jug to wrap around the front of the boot, and secured it in place with a staple gun, then trimmed it to the contours of the sole. A piece from the side corner/rounded bottom of the jug was fit into place as the toe of the boot. At this point, it looked like a translucent white Frankenstein shoe.
Other pieces of the jug were used as details: a roughly triangular piece from the creased bottom corner of the jug made a serviceable nose and flared nostrils; the bottom of the jug yielded a nasal ridge; small curved bits from near the top of the jug made eyebrow ridges. After fitting all the pieces, I took it all apart, traced my cut pieces onto a second jug and cut out another set.
Then both boot covers were assembled permanently using hot glue.
The plastic base was covered with three layers of plaster bandage and left to dry. I then added more details. The eyes were made from miniature plastic Christmas balls broken in half with pliers. The brow ridges, eyelids, lip line and teeth were bulked in using old nylon ropes from the storage shed. All the pieces were hot glued into place and then covered with another three layers of plaster bandage. The bandage was covered in a thick layer of papier-mache, and the final details were sculpted in by hand, then sanded smooth when dry. NOTE: The papier mache shells were pretty easy to ding up. If I were to do something like this again, I'd use fiberglass cloth or Bondo to give the shells a little more toughness.

The shells were carefully removed from the boots, then primed and painted silver using the same spray paints that I used for the armor. The boots themselves were painted silver using shoe spray paint.
The spaces between the teeth and the nostrils were painted with Testor’s black enamel model paint, and I mixed a gunmetal color from black and silver enamel to darken the creases between the brow ridges and around the eyes.
The eyes themselves were base-painted with red enamel, then covered with red sequins one at a time using super glue and a straight pin.
Finally, the shells were attached to the boot soles with wood screws in the black spaces between the teeth, the screwheads were touched up with black paint, and the dragon heads were done.