Reforming a monster is easier in art than in life. So is repairing one.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a challenge.

Sabra Overby stooped to peer into the maw of her papier-mâché beast, positioned on a pedestal on the dining room table in her home “studio” in Colorado Springs. She pointed to several fangs in the creature’s mouth that were a lighter, matte hue. 

The day after the buyers picked up the piece last month, their son was playing and accidentally toppled it from the mantle.  

“I felt so bad. Three of the teeth broke off. And his horns, those were really damaged too,” said Overby.

So the flightless dragon who’d plummeted to earth was returned to the nest for emergency surgery and some new chompers, which Overby fashions from a material similar to polymer clay, then cooks in the oven ’til it’s rock hard.

“It was just so hard to get going on it again, to fix it, after I’d spent so much time on making it in the first place,” she said. “You know what I mean? I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to do it as good as I did the first time.”

The only thing harder than taking a first step, is taking it again down a road you thought was in the rearview. But papier-mâché dragons don’t heal themselves.

“Everything’s a process, you’ve just got to start the process,” Overby said.

And if you’re lucky, that’s where passion takes over. Again.

Overby is a 42-year-old Army veteran, with a quick and disarming laugh and long hair she wears in dreadlocks that spill down her back, one outward expression of the artistic flair that for years took a back-burner to her career in the military and as a mother raising three kids.

She’s sold a dozen sculptures since first marketing her wares through word of mouth and then social media last year. The mounted heads go for $600, an amount Overby’s boyfriend, Greg Ciani, said doesn’t reflect the time that goes into each piece, which with construction and drying takes about 16 weeks.

During that time, it also takes over her life.

Ciani thought his girlfriend was doing too much work last year, so made plans for the pair to camp on state lands near Buena Vista, where they could relax and soak in the natural hot springs. They drove down and Ciani found the perfect spot to set up camp, by a creek that trickled down the mountain.

Overby woke at 3 a.m. and told Ciani they needed to leave. She’d had an epiphany about a piece she was working on. 

“I had to turn around and bring her home. I was mad as hell, but I got over it,” Ciani said.

It’s impossible to hold a grudge against something whose outcome seems to make everyone involved so happy.

“Whatever she imagines it seems like she can do it, and I think that’s pretty cool. One guy, when he came to pick his dragon up, he actually had tears in his eyes when he saw it,” said Ciani, gazing around the living room of the home they share, a veritable gallery of artworks whose final forms belie their makeup.

Cats riding bicycles and skis, and wielding samurai swords. A foot-tall Erte-esque sculpture of a dancer, whose core is a Coke bottle.

And those amazing dragons.

Imagine a not-quite-to-scale shoulder-mounted taxidermied buck, only as a scaled and spiked dragon so lifelike (if one can say such a thing) it seems poised to spring forth in glistening ferocity. 

“It amazes me, because everything looks like crap at first and while she’s working on it, and the next thing I know she’s got this amazing thing going,” said Ciani. “I can carve, so I understand the idea of taking something big and making it into something smaller. But she builds things up, and I can never see how she comes out with what she does.”

Vision requires commitment, and vice versa.

Overby is entirely self-taught, with assists from Google and other papier-mâché dragon artists around the country.

She’s always had a love and flair for art, but when she was working full-time and her kids were young it was tough to find the time, and space, for such indulgences, said Overby, whose oldest will graduate this year from high school. Her kids, all teens who live with her ex-husband in Texas, were the recipients of some of her earliest works, including a wall-mounted papier-mache T-Rex and a moose.

The Army brought Overby from Texas to the Springs, and Colorado was where she fell in love — with the landscape, and with Ciani. She decided to stay after retiring from the military in 2016.

It’s hard to believe her creations, with their bones of wire, guts of paper and foam, and skin of fabric, phone book pages, cardboard egg crates and disposable blue shop towels, are the output of an artist who only found her groove two years ago, when the pandemic shut-down led to a void in social schedules and obligations.

Overby’s projects started small, with mushed up glue and paper slurries she turned into beads, then necklaces, then coiled into bowls.

“Just all kinds of different bowls. Then she decided, ‘I’m going to try sculpture.’ And of course she likes cats, so her first things were cats,” Ciani said. “Next thing I know, it’s ‘I’m not going to do cats now. I’m going to do dragons.’”

Looking back, Overby sees a greater — and deeper — arc at play in her artistic evolution.

Like her creations, the truth took shape slowly.

“I was just having a bad day, and that’s when I was like, lemme try these dragons. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized why I was doing this,” said Overby, who is a survivor of sexual assault in the military. “A lot of my dragons portray some of the monsters I have met in real life. I take some of those monsters I met and I worked with and I make them beautiful, and kind, and give them cute names. That’s my way of coping.”

Each dragon, once complete, carries away some of that weight.

“I thought, maybe this is what I need. Because the therapy at the VA is sure not helping,” she said. “This was my way of sort of repairing myself, I guess you could say. My personal therapy has been creating art, creating dragons.”