Baking polymer clay sculptures in the oven
One of the best properties for polymer clay is that a kiln is not necessary to cure the clay. Polymer clay can be baked at low temperatures and the household oven or toaster oven is all that you need.
I predominately use Super Sculpey so the instructions below will use Super Sculpey for the example. However, no matter what clay you use, you should be able to see baking instructions for it on the box or container that the clay came in.
Super Sculpey’s instructions recommend baking your sculpture at 275 degrees for 15 minutes for every ¼ of an inch in thickness. If you have a sculpture that is over ¼ an inch thick then I would recommend either backing the sculpture in stages or lowering the temperature and baking the sculpture for a longer period of time. My personal preference is to bake my sculptures for a longer period of time at lower temperatures. I’ll put my sculpture in the oven at around 200 degrees and let it sit while the oven heats up to around 230 – 250 degrees. I will then bake it at that temperature for about 30 minutes. This process has worked well for me but you may want to test with a sketch piece before baking a finished piece.
Another great property for baking polymer clay is that you can bake it multiple times so that you can work on your sculpture at different stages. To bake and re-bake your sculpture you will need to use Vaseline.First of all, you will need to bake your sculpture and let it sit for awhile to cool down. After your sculpture has completely cooled down, could take several hours depending on the size of the sculpture, you will need to lightly coat the baked sculpture with Vaseline. I recommend using a paint brush to apply the Vaseline but your finger should also work. After the Vaseline has been applied you will then wipe it down with a paper towel or rag.
The next step is to apply a thin layer of clay on top of the Vaseline to adhere the clay to the baked sculpture. This should give you a sticky enough area to begin sculpting on top of the baked area. There are no limits to how many times you can bake the sculpture so just repeat the steps above if you need to bake the sculpture again.
hi! i’m very interested about polymer.. when i first saw this in multiply.com, i got interested. I’m so glad i stumbled on to your site because i learned about Polymer clay. You have simple instructions to make an ordinary person like me understand what is it all about.
By the way, may I ask about the Vaseline you mentioned on the article about Polymer Clay Over? is that the Vaseline we use on babies for diaper rash? I know it sounds funny (you might even laugh!). Hope you can answer my question thanks!!!
eeexcellent!
Will it be 100% safe to bake a head made with Super Sculpy in my home, kitchen oven? Or are there any contaminants in the Sculpy and therefore, my oven should not be used at all?
Thank you for your reply.
Jorge,
Just my two cents….
There are a lot of comments on the web saying that it is not safe and to use a separate oven instead (i.e. toaster oven). There are also comments from others that disagree that it is as unhealthy as some would like you to believe. I would not say it is 100% safe and believe you would be better off if you had another oven to use instead. However, I’ve used my own oven in the past but I do not bake a lot of sculpey sculptures these days (work more with wax now). There are also other options like placing the sculpt in a turkey roasting bags that you may want to look into. Someone else would have to comment on how effective they are since I’ve never used them.
I have just started using polymer clay, right now I am sculpting a maquette of boar’s head from a book I am illustrating. I’m wondering if I will run into problems in the baking stage because the head is thick and “meaty” but the ears are thin.
You can see images of it on my blog: http://whatawhale.blogspot.com/2011/01/sculpting-boar-head-for-art-show.html