Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Sculpey


Around the middle of last year, when I became obsessed with Angry Birds, I got it in my head that I wanted little polymer clay birds. I kept meaning to pick up the clay, but then forgetting, and eventually forgot the idea entirely. Aaron got me some Sculpey for Christmas though, and once more I meant to actually use it, but forgot. Sculpey is neat stuff. Since it's a Polymer Clay, it doesn't dry, which is good for when I ADD off and forget it on the table for a few hours.

Fast forward to a few days ago, when I decided that if I'm going to be awake until 5/6am every night that I was going to do something somewhat productive with my time. So at 3am, I decided to put together a quick turtle. Turtles are simple. Shell, 4 legs, head, tail. How hard could it be...


I couldn't get the shell to look like... well... anything but a potato, and one of his feet got injured in transit to the oven. Refusing to get deterred, I quickly whipped up a quick snail. No legs to break, and a simple shell! That'll be easy, right?


Again, cute. But this one still looks like it was made by a child as well. A bit more dawdling resulted in a ladybug, which was actually pretty good for my fledgling efforts, and inspired me to try and learn more!




At this point I did some research, and learned that Rubbing Alcohol worked really well for smoothing the clay out. And lo and behold, The things I made started looking somewhat better!


I was playing around with brown clay to see what I could do using the new techniques that I'd learned, and it started resembling a bunny. So that's what this critter ended up becoming! Once I started being able to make the clay things resemble what they looked like in my head, I continued on to make the nerdy things I'd aspired to when I was getting started.

First, of course, was the Angry Bird.


He was lopsided, but he actually strongly resembled what I expected him to!

Next came the Jigglypuff.


Hrm. Jigglypuff had some issues with scale. So I decided to do a quick, easy pick me up before attempting the big daddy, and came up with this guy.


Satisfied that I was ready to tackle the lord of all Sculpey figures, I started! And here he is, Chibi Cthulu!


Isn't he just the CUTEST little Chaos Lord?

Next week: Tackling the art of taking pictures of small things....


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