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