Making a mess with clay (the halloween special)
As a part of working my way towards making a cast-able miniature, I need to learn the art of sculpting. What better (or cheaper) place to start than with some Das clay and some sculpting tools. Now, I know that Das clay is not considered suitable for miniatures because of the amount of shrinking that it undergoes whilst drying, but I already had some to hand from making bases with greenstuff world rollers.
I set out to sculpt a face to go on a demon door type construct inspired by the game Fable. Wearing some examination gloves to minimise fingerprinting, I wet the clay and rolled out a few spheres, before flattening them out with successive strokes from a (wet) sculpting tool (much like a plasterer might flatten a daub of plaster). Then with my fingers I pinched the sides in to create what might generously be called a chin. Using a conical tool, I poked 2 eye holes. Between these holes I added an ovoid blob of clay to serve as a nose and roughly mushed this onto the face with repeated strokes from a sculpting tool.
After air drying overnight, I painted the face with various mixtures of red and sand as well as using black to fill in the empty eye sockets and the mouth. At the end I was left with an acceptable, if amateurish, spooky face as well as some leftover clay. I thought I would try and sculpt some shields with faces, since so many chaos warrior type miniatures are sold on Ebay without their shield.
These shields are truly awful. Lots of rough edges and mushy “detail”. I’d intended for these faces to be reminiscent of greek theatre masks indicatingtragedy and comedy, but this is just bad. However, this is to be expected from my early sculpting attempts and I will be holding on to these shields. After all, when I sculpt a terrible miniature, it will need a terrible shield to match. For my next attempt I will be paying particular attention to smoothing out any rough edges. I can see now why so many polymer clay sculptors use rubbing alcohol to soften the surface before firing.
This was a fun little excursion into sculpting and I’d say I learned a fair bit. See you next time.
