Sitting Faun Sculpture using Preimer Air Dry Clay

This is picking up from the last post to show my Preimer air dry clay sculpture of a sitting faun. This is my first great sculpture that I made out of preimer clay.I used this clay for a few years already but never as my main sculpting medium. I would use it to accent a base or something like for, for a figure I sculpted with magic sculpt epoxy clay or polymer clay. Recently I have been completing full projects using this wonderful clay. First it is an air dry clay. So no baking involved. It sands and carves very well. New clay can be added to already dried clay. 

So this faun came about because I wet the mold too much and the clay ended up getting messed while pulling out. Instead of trying to remake the cat face. I wanted to try something different and eventually made this faun. 

Its not perfect by any means but its a really cute sculpt. I really like it. 

I needed to do alot of sanding to get the body shape better, 

Preimer Air Dry Clay properties with water is where it sets it apart from other sculpting compounds that I have used before. So with magic sculpt, it can be smoothed with water and wet sanded to get a very smooth and polished surface. Polymer clay does not really smooth with water, but it can certainly be wet sanded. 

Premier has to be carefully wet sanded because water will dissolve the clay, even already fully dried pieces. At first I thought this was a major down fall of this product.  I started to wet sand this faun sculpt, and noticed that the fur was starting to become less pronounced as my wet hands were holding it to sand another area. 

There are many times where I don’t want to keep working and reworking an area even though it’s not perfect yet. If in polymer clay I would set to bake what I have. If in epoxy clay I would have to let it air dry. Once the clay was dried, the only way to fix the areas were most likely sanding. 

Being that premier is water dissolvable another option for smoothing is to just brush on water to an area and gently wear it down. The danger is that areas that were previously done and safe have the potential to be washed away too. I feel I have greater control in smoothing a tiny area then trying to get sand paper into a small crevice, and then applying enough force to actually change anything. As long a brush can squeeze in somewhere, anywhere can be easily smoothed. I don’t have to over sand and then add more clay and sand again. 

Of course everyone finds what works for them. Many people do not serial bake their polymer clay and wait until it’s perfect the first time before baking. You have to find what methods let you make the best sculptures.

Here I am fixing the fur area. 

I worked hard on the fingers, He has two right hands though. I didnt want to fix it. 

Im just sanding back and forth and using a knife too to define the fingers. 

I varnished with glass varnish to seal the clay. I liked this sculpture so I wanted to do a mold of it. 

I'm doing a 3 part mold. first I build up the clay box. 

I use lets resin silicone putty with a plaster shell 

These are the three parts of the mold. I didn't wait too long for the plaster to dry so one piece cracked when I removed it. Because the silicone was so greasy, the plaster just slid off. I got the plaster strips and its much better for odd shapes like this.     

This is first casting I did of the faun mold. Made out of polymer clay. 

I did a 2nd polymer clay casting. 

The rest of the castings I did using hearty air dry clay. I had an opened package I wanted to use up. 

I try to do the castings a little bit different. 

I ended up liking this one alot too. 

I decided to use liquid silicone to make better molds, here I'm using duplo lego blocks for the mold box 

the spaces between blocks are big. I fill them with clay.

I'm using smooth on Mold Star quick setting silicone. 

I got 2 trial size kits and I wanted to do 3 two part molds with it. So I still did a small layer of plaster. The molds arent really the greatest designed, with large undercuts. 

I didnt make a casting for the liquid silicone mold but it seems to be good. 

Next I wanted to do molds of the other two fauns. I like using the blocks because I can build up the clay bed as I work better. Here I got regular sized legos. 

I cut the hand to have the mold not as deep. Ideally I could have cut the sculpture into more pieces for casting but I didn't want to do a garage kit. 

Still needed to fill in gaps between the bricks. There are not official legos, but not sure if that mattered. 

I did a few pours. I didn't want to end up with extra mixed silicone that I couldn't use.

Thats it for these for these for now. I need to stop making molds of stuff and actually complete some sculptures now

Polymer Clay Sculpting and Casting WIP: Lab Scientist Cat

I didn't know what to do next, but I decided on a cartoonish cat in a lab coat. I'm using a mix of cernit polymer clay mixed with sculpey living doll clay. I used a wire armature underneath and started with the face. I didn't think this was going to amount to anything so this is the earliest sculpting pictures that I took. Sometimes I just want to relax and sculpt on the couch with a lap desk. 

 This one was sculpted in 3D from the beginning instead of doing front half flat like the mushroom girl. 

I like the face. I started working on this sculpture mid-August and it lasted from October. Actual sculpting time isnt longer than a few hours but life was happening and there just wasn't alot of time. 

I baked the face and upper body first and then I started to add clay to the lower body. I use a stand alone Deni convention oven for my polymer clay baking. I don't think they make the specific model I have anymore, but it’s the type that is a clear glass bowl. 

The idea is that it’s a humanoid cat dressed as a scientist. So I was going for a business suit underneath the lab coat. I also thought I could have sculpted him in scrubs too. 

The side and back views. 

At this point, I used Let’s resin silicone putty and made a mold of the body. I figured that the mold is more simple without involving the arms. The idea is to make different poses from this master that I’m doing now. It saves time from sculpting from scratch each time and each piece would still be unique. 

Here is what the mold looks like. I said before but the Let’s resin silicone brand putty is extremely oily. So if I added on a 2nd layer of putty, it will not stick to the first layer. I have only tried right after the first layer was cured enough to pull the master from. It’s possible after the silicone fully cured that subsequent silicone would stick to it. But rh point of using the putty vs the liquid type is its ease of use and short project completion time. If I had to wait days to get a strong mold it doesn’t make sense to use it. Of course I could just use a thicker application in one go but the way I press the putty onto the master, there will be thin spots most of the time. 

So I will be pouring plaster to have a stronger mold shell. 

I am using up very old plaster that I had left over from other projects. To me the end results is alright. 

Here the two mold halves are separated and the master survived intact. In the past I did not have great luck making a full plaster mold, so that’s why I use the silicone for the first layer. 

 I continued on working on the original sculpture now, adding the arms and lab coat. 

So the idea was to have him holding a loop and streaking an agar plate. But the toothpick us too fat really and I need something better to make the plate. He looks like a vampire hunter too. 

The light blue polymer clay is a mix of cernit and living doll, but the white coat is fimo. Fimo is just too hard for me. Sculpey III consistency is easier to work with for me but it is not as strong as fimo. I have a bunch of different colors of the sample packs of fimo but I’ll probably mix them with other polymer clay in the future. I figured since the coat was going to be white, why not use white clay but I couldn’t blend it as well. 

There are the first castings that I made from the armless cat mold I showed above. The one with the messed up nose will become a faun statue that I will post next. These were made using premier air dry

The blue cat is from the same mold but using polymer clay. It is also the cernit/ living doll mix but more cernit. 

I added the coat to the sitting cat, this time just using the same clay. 

Here is the original cat standing and all the casts I made from the same mold. Each one looks different. None of them are ready for sale yet though. I kept on jumping from project to project instead of finishing them one at a time.