Blue Oranda Sculpts: Prosculpt Polymer Clay Mermaid with Mohair Hair.

This post will cover how I created this mermaid using polymer clay, mohair, and Gemini heat set paints.

This is the "Ava" mermaid press mold from Patricia Rose. Sadly it seems that many of these press molds are not available anymore, though they come up on ebay from time to time. These plaster molds can only use polymer clay, other types of clay will get stuck in the mold and being a rigid type one, the clay will be very difficult to remove. So just best to stick with polymer clay. I am using prosculpt polymer clay.

Cleaning the mold seamlines. It's better to have excess clay to trim then to have to add more clay later on, as the two halves will not stick together then. I am leaving the hook in to keep it as an ornament.

Here I am making the wire frame for the mermaid tail.

The clay tailfin is blended into the rest of the tail.

Here is another angle.

I made a mistake here. I used cotton balls as a soft bed for the mermaids to be laying on, but actually it is not a good material to do this with. The cotton balls are not at all the same as polyfil, which is what I should have been using. The oven smells a bit stronger after this baking. My oven was quite old at this point so I thought it was breaking not realizing it was because of the cotton balls. Also the backside of the clay did not heatup correctly either.

here I am using a sanding box that I got from temu. This version has the hand cut out holes on either side. It was not comfortable to me. I know this is a more popular style and other more expensive models follow the same design, but I much prefer the style where the hand cut outs are both on the same side. Sanding paper I use 100, 240, 400, 600 grit, usually starting with the 240.

The smaller mermaid pictured is from using the minnow press mold. I was working on these two at the same time.

Sanding the smaller mermaid was fine inside the box but the larger one was difficult to get good angles. There exists different size boxes, I got the smaller, about 7in x 12in one.

sanding larger mermaid

So I ended up taking the larger mermaid out of the box to sand, defeating its purpose.

Here they are all finished sanded right before painting.

I started painting the smaller mermaid first. This was the first time I used these Gemini heat set paints. I has previously used the well-known Genesis heat set paints but they are no longer made. The feel of using them is basically the same. I start with a thinner and then paint in the shadows.

I paint the full mermaid with the Gemini heat set paint so I moved on to the tail now. It is nice to just heat them in the oven and know that the paint is all set and permanent.

painting larger mermaid with heat set paints

Here I'm painting the larger mermaid.

I thinned the paint and did a light blue.

Finally, I am gluing the wig on. I only did a few mohair wigs in the past but I dont remember having as much difficulty with it as I did for these two. I think the problem was that I had the wire still in the head and so there wasn't as much room for the hair to go and adhere too.