Polymer Clay Fan

This lesson is a continuation from the last one in the sense that I’m still working on adding and subtracting clay here and there to finalize the shape of the breast. The nice thing about sculpting with a polymer clay like Super Sculpey is that you can easily smooth out the clay with just your fingers. I’ve included some pictures below where I show how I shaped and smoothed out my sculpture using my thumb. It is quick and easy to do and I try to use my fingers as much as possible when smoothing out larger areas in the clay (belly, back, arms, etc).

Keep in mind that you if you can get the sculpture perfectly smooth with your fingers you can always use rubbing alcohol and a brush to smooth out the clay even more. The particular sculpture will end up having a texture to it by the time I’m done so my main goal at this point is to just get the shapes down. Read the rest of this entry »

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There are several different ways that I could approach sculpting the scars on my sculpture and no one way is really better than the other. Since I’m working with polymer clay, Super Sculpey to be specific, the easiest approach in my opinion is to roll out snakes of clay and remove the unwanted pieces. If I was working with wax I may take a different approach such as adding small balls of wax one at a time but I would have to experiment first before confirming.

* Note: I’ve blocked out parts of the sculpture in case anyone is sensitive to nudity. Once I’m finished I’ll add a link to an uncensored picture of the sculpture for anyone that wants to see the complete design. This will be done at the end of the tutorial and for now I’ll just censor the pics as needed. Read the rest of this entry »

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In this tutorial I will go into more detail on how I created the textures on the skirt. Keep in mind that I got the idea for the design of the skirt from looking at various pictures of African women on the web. Most of my research was from images that the search results produced from the keyword “African scarification”. During my research I found several images where the skirt just seemed to overlap itself in various places around the woman’s legs. The design appealed to me, in some respects it was very simplistic but the design in the images still seemed to draw me to the beauty of the woman in the photograph. I really liked this design and wanted to incorporate it into this piece.

The skirt’s shape is really simple, just roll out sheets of clay in the pasta machine and wrap then along the legs of the sculpture in various stages. Once that is achieved I used my wire brush to scrape lines into the dress. I applied various pressure using the wire sculpting tool so that some of the lines were deeper while others were kind of shallow.

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In the last lesson we covered the steps on how to create one half of our silicone mold.  The next and final step is to create the second half of our mold.  I have documented the  process below.

1. Once the silicone has cured it is time to cleanup the portion of the sculpture that was covered with the clay bed that we created in lesson two on this tutorial.
2. The first thing that I do is remove the X-acto board box.  Be careful not to destroy the box since we will be using again for the second half of our mold.
3. Once the box has been removed carefully remove the clay bed from the sculpture and the cured silicone.  I use alcohol to cleanup the remaining clay off of my sculpture and the silicone covering the first half of my piece. Read the rest of this entry »

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Adding Bumps To The Shoulders

OK, I know we have been through this song and dance before but since it is such a catchy tune we are going to sing it just one more time. I liked the way the bumps turned out on the traps and the chest and wanted to blend the same design into the shoulders. The key was to try and create a pattern with my design that didn’t look like I just threw a bunch of balls of clay onto my sculpture. Basically what I did was follow the individual shoulder muscles and placed my pattern in them. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out and have documented the process below.

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Sculpting Hair Onto the Elbow

I wanted to add a little pizzazz to my arm so I decided to add some hair flowing from the elbow. Since the arm is already detached the best and easiest approach from this point is to sculpt the hair before reattaching the arm to the Fiddler’s shoulder. The pictures below will take you step by step through the process. In the third and fourth picture I used 90% alcohol to smooth out the sculpture.

* Keep in mind that Vaseline is required when adding new clay to baked clay (If you have no idea what I’m talking about start at the begging of this tutorial and work your way back here ).

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The Second Step for Making a Mold

The key ingredients for making a successful mold is planning and patience. Planning is obvious but patience can easily be overlooked. It is important that you take your time and do everything step with and precision. Otherwise what is the point of spending all that time creating your sculpture if you are not going to be able to replicate it with the same type of quality and detail.

This tutorial will cover in detail on how to make a mold box. The mold box is what is going to be used to hold the silicone while it hardens. In future lessons we will go into detail on how the final mold is created.

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From my experience there is a vast difference in the amount of effort that is required to smooth out wax sculptures versus sculptures sculpted with any of the polymer clays. The underlying principles and concepts are the same but wax, when cooled, is a much harder medium and thus requires quite a bit more work to achieve the desired result. Keep in mind that this is under the assumption that you smooth out your polymer clay sculptures prior to baking, which I have always done in the past. Some sculptors will bake their polymer clay sculptures and use wet sanding techniques for the final smoothing stages (this process will exponentially increases the amount of work needed to smooth out the sculpture).

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Recently I had put together a little article that outlines some of the key differences between sculpting with wax and polymer clays (http://www.polymerclayfan.com/sculpting-with-wax-vs-polymer-clay.htm). In hindsight, the review was more of a comparison between sculpting with Super Sculpey and a relatively new wax called FUSE. I think it is important to point out that not all polymer clays are created equal and the same case could be made for wax. As of the writing of this article, FUSE is the only wax I have ever tried so the chances are that my opinions regarding sculpting with wax could drastically change from one wax product to another.

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Working on the left arm

I think the theme for my latest tutorials is going to be about fixing mistakes.  I did not do a very good job with the armature at the beginning of this sculpture and I am now paying for it.  Basically the clay is too heavy for the shoulder and arm to support all of the weight.  I’m now having issues where the shoulder is splitting in half because of the weight of the arm and the fiddle.

Right now the only way that I see to resolve this issue is to bake the shoulder and arm as one piece and attach it to the Fiddler’s torso at a later time.  Most likely I’ll still have a weight issue at the point I attach the arm at so my workaround for that will be to partially bake the entire area where the shoulder attaches to (I’ll cover that in more detail later on)

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