‘Loads of enjoyable’: Native retirees construct big dragon sculpture in yard

Rita and Dean Robinson retired in 2022 after working the favored Candy Shoppe on Highway 11, simply north of Orillia, after proudly owning and working the favored store for 23 years. 

Rita and Dean haven’t been bored of their retirement. They have been busy constructing their estimated 40-foot-tall sheet metallic dragon and her child — amongst many different artistic pursuits.

The more and more fashionable dragon, which is seen to boaters navigating the Trent-Severn Waterway, will not be their solely retirement challenge. 

The Robinsons even have many distinctive antiquing finds and tinkering initiatives of their three-car storage, initially used to retailer sweet for the store. 

“We had 800 cases of candy in here,” recalled Rita. “Just rows and rows. It was all business. It was all candy and business.”

They had metal racks crammed with soda pop and circumstances of sweet as excessive as Dean’s chest. Every morning, they’d drive the sweet they wanted from their storage to the store in their very own automobiles. 

Now that they’ve retired, the house is crammed with candy items of a unique type: artistic initiatives and antiquing finds. 

Dean says he and his spouse have very completely different tastes relating to antiquing. He appears to be like for “garage stuff,” as he calls it: boat motors, previous fuel pumps, automotive elements, previous snowmobiles— something technical that he can tinker with. 

On the opposite hand, Rita’s curiosity lies in inventive items that may encourage her creativity. Her finds line the upstairs room of their storage, proper above Dean’s workspace. 

“I went, ‘OK, this is the idea I have in my head. I want to do a 3D painting that you can walk into.’ So, the upstairs is just a fantasy, just a lot of fun,” she says. 

She labored on her walk-through portray all through the COVID-19 lockdown. Rita says the room labored as an outlet for her, one thing she might work on for a number of hours right here and there. 

“It took time to do it piece by piece, but it was one of those things you could kind of think of and just work at, come up here and play with it,” she says. “It kind of evolved with whatever we found.”

The couple’s retirement has enabled them to discover their artistic concepts extra freely, but it surely was not a simple choice to stroll away from the enterprise.

“We started saying goodbye to people, and we had kids coming and grabbing us, and hugging us, crying. It was months and months of people making a special trip just to say goodbye, because they’d seen us for 23 years,” says Rita. “It was really weird. It’s like being at your wake, but you’re still alive.”

They say their 23-year stint on the retailer introduced them near their neighborhood, which introduced them a whole lot of pleasure. 

Their greatest challenge since retiring from the Candy Shoppe is, certainly, the large metal dragon wrapped round a tree of their riverfront yard. 

“We may not have the biggest house on the river, but we definitely have the biggest lawn ornament,” Rita says. “I’m so pleased with how it turned out.” 

The dragon’s head alone is five-and-a-half toes lengthy. 

“It was a process,” Rita says. “I didn’t realize how big it looked, but when you’re on the water and you’re sitting and looking up, it looks like the thing is twice the size of my house.”

The dragon’s physique wraps itself round their half-cut tree. It is made up of a sequence of rings, held collectively on a body and coated in scales product of sheet metallic. Dean strengthened the tree with metallic rods to ensure it might face up to the dragon’s weight. 

“It was done section by section,” Rita says. “When we actually got into doing all the scales and stuff, that was literally draw and cut, draw and cut, on sheet metal.”

The dragon’s particulars referred to as for some professional creativity from Rita. 

The dragon’s eyes have been made with automotive reflectors set into metallic bowls. The detailing on her wings comes from lower up cookie trays. Her nostril is a potato masher. The solar element at her jaw covers a hinge that lets her mouth open within the wind; Rita purchased it from a greenback retailer. 

The dragon’s child was born final spring. Rita says Dean started constructing the framework for the child’s egg after some critical convincing. 

The child makes use of a lot of the identical elements as its mom, right down to the greenback retailer solar decoration. Aside from measurement, key distinction between the 2 is the brilliant shiny metallic of the smaller dragon. 

“We spray painted the baby with lacquer, so it won’t rust. So, it looked like a newborn,” says Rita. 

She already has extra plans for initiatives to fill their yard. 

“I’m bugging him with what I want him to do next. I want him to do a giant five-foot hummingbird,” she says. “He said no to the Ogopogo coming in and out of our lawn.”

With inspiration coming from throughout them, Rita and Dean’s inventive and engineering teamwork will certainly proceed.