Clay Sculpts of Lyra

I have been practicing my sculpture skills of late and I made a couple of sculptures of my Lyra puppet. I started out by making a wire armature to support the air dry clay and then used a mix of my fingers, knives and cocktail sticks to sculpt the clay with. Once dried I sanded the whole sculpt to give a smooth finish.

I used acrylic inks to paint the sculpture and then used a coat of matte varnish to finish it off.

Border Collie Clay Sculpt

 

I made this border collie sculpture for my Mum's 60th birthday present. It's made from air dry clay and painted with acrylic paint and watercolours. I was able to practice creating the illusion of fur all over the body, without actually texturing the whole sculpt, as I used a few choice tufts of fur to give the impression of it being fully covered.

Handmade Tree Of Life Necklace

I made this tree of life necklace for a birthday present, as I always like to go for the personal, handmade touch. 

Made from twisted wire and with a translucent polymer clay back, tinted with watercolours. If you hold it up to the light, the polymer clay looks a bit like stained glass!

Puppy Painting

I finished painting the clay dog sculpt! I then dyed some fabric for the neckerchief. It looks so much better painted as it has emphasized the dog's expression. When I next sculpt something, I need to work on just going that extra mile to make sure everything is smoothed out and precise, just to get that really high quality feel. Same with the paint job, just a bit more precision is needed. This dog is undeniably cute though!

Puppy Dog Eyes

I made a little clay dog yesterday. The look it's giving is pretty much the same as the one on my dog's face while I was sculpting the clay: 'Why are you playing with that fake clay dog and not with me? I'm a real dog!! Pretty pleeeeeeeeeease take me for a walk!'.... or something like that anyway....

The clay is still drying, it's taking ages (grrrrrr impatience!), but once that's done I'm going to paint it and give it a little neckerchief as I think that would look cool.

Once the clay had been worked with for a bit it became a lot more pliable, as initially it kept contracting back into itself, kind of like when you make bread and you roll the dough out with a rolling pin and it squashes back into itself. The outer layer dried quite quickly so I had to keep wetting it with water, but despite this it is a nice material to work with. I put some cocktail sticks in the front legs and in the neck to give the clay some support, as otherwise it would collapse in on itself.

The left eye was a bit tricky as I found it hard to get it to match the right one, so I'm not entirely happy with this part of the sculpt. Symmetry is hard!

Making A Clay Head

I have been making the head for Una. I started out by scrunching some tinfoil up tight to form the core of her head, to help keep the weight down. As although the head is very small, polymer clay is not the lightest of materials, so any weight I am able to shed is for the better.

I then covered the tinfoil in Fimo polymer clay. From this ball I built up the shape of Una's face. It was quite tricky working at such a small size and took me a fair while to get a decent result. It was hard to smooth any unwanted marks in the clay out, I needed skinnier fingertips!

I made a hole in the bottom of the head, big enough for the wire that will form the neck when I make the armature to be glued in. It goes quite deep so that the head will fit more securely on the armature.

Next I baked the head in the oven for half an hour, and once it had cooled I had a nice hard head

Rough Una Head Sculpt

Rough sculpt of Una's head made with plasticine. The sculpt is bigger than the actual puppet head will be, I was just using this to translate my 2D drawings into 3D, before I tried making the much smaller (and therefore more difficult!) head.

Wolf Head Sculpt

I had a play with some plasticine and made a wolf's head. I used an old toothbrush to texture the finer fur on the muzzle and then just used my knife to texture the rest of the fur.