May 15, 2006
Made a Scary Head
These pictures turned out horribly, but hopefully they'll convey the general idea.
I've finished my first head in polymer clay. My tentative plan is to make busts until I am happy with how the faces turn out. This way I'll use less clay and get some experience with painting their features. I keep thinking that compared to doing eyes on one inch tall miniatures, painting these will be cake, but I expect that some complications will develop in the actual process.
Right now I'm just using the water based miniature paints that I already have access to. I've read a couple of suggestions that Genesis heat set paints are the way to go, but since I don't have a heat gun, I'm going to stick with the cheap option for now. I've noticed that I can't do washes with the water based paints (they bead up on the surface of the clay) but other than that they seem to work fine. I can't speak to their durability, but they don't need to take all that much punishment, so I'm not too worried.
I'm not quite sure what to do with this head yet. Overall I'm optimistic about her features (at least for my first try). Her nose and lips both have issues, but I don't think they look too crazy. I don't really want to talk about her cheekbones.
I'll probably try to paint her today or tomorrow, then I have to decide what sort of clothing/hair/whatever she should have. I'm sort of thinking scarf and some of the sheep's wool I use for hand spinning, but I haven't really decided yet. I should probably consider covering her ugly lumpy shoulders as well.
A lot of the tutorials I looked at suggested making heads on a stick to allow for minimum accidental squishing. I tried to place her on a stick to start with, but she just pulled herself right back off as I worked on her. I'm not really sure how to handle that. I also managed to crack her when she was cooling. It was terribly exciting. The crack is hard to see and I expect if I paint over it no one will be able to tell it's there.
I read in several places online that one should not bake polymer clay on metal, but all of these places neglected to mention why. I'm probably going with a parchment paper pad inside an aluminum foil enclosure for now, but I would like to know why I shouldn't just be baking on metal.
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