Fast Drying Tip

Chicken Lips (David Everett) is in the business of making cute and clever characters with Creative Paperclay and needs to speed up production time....so here's his tip for getting your Paperclay to dry a bit faster.

Note:  Drying TOO fast (such as oven) is NOT recommended for most ADC creations.  Air dry clay needs to dry evenly inside & out.   Also, Styrofoam is often used for armature with air-dry clays and heating Styrofoam in oven can create toxic fumes!   Not good !

How to Wrap Foam Balls Without Trapping Air

Many air-dry clay projects call for Styrofoam shapes as armatures for figure modeling. On my other blog, "Cold Porcelain Tutorials", we've featured a series of videos from Marisol Romero showing the proper way to wrap Styrofoam shapes with cold porcelain (without getting cracks or trapped air).   The very same methods could be used with any brand of soft air-dry clay.    Check 'Cold Porcelain Tutorials' for video demos showing how to wrap small and large foam balls, half-spheres, double-spheres and more.

Tutorial: Creating a BJD Head and Face

~ click photos to enlarge ~    

Linda Macario, the Italian doll-maker, has written a wonderful tutorial for creating the head for a BJD (ball-jointed doll) .   LaDoll air-dry clay is suggested.  Creative Paperclay would also be suitable for this project.   Lots of photos demonstrate how to sculpt the Styrofoam core, apply the clay, model the facial features, hollow out the head & insert the eyes and also create the head articulation.

Further steps in the tutorial demonstrate how she paints the delicate features (called "face-up") to create a doll similar to the ones shown in these photos!   Aren't they beautiful?   Linda is an amazing doll artist!   This is a great air dry clay tutorial even if you're not interested in making a full BJD body and just want to sculpt the face.   I hope this encourages you to make your first doll!   I'm excited to try it myself! ;-)

  

How to Properly Wrap a Foam Cone with Clay

In our last post, we featured a video which demonstrates the proper way to wrap a Styrofoam ball with cold porcelain. The foam ball is the most common armature used when making cute air-dry clay figures but the Styrofoam CONE is also used often.  In the following video, Haydee Miranda demonstrates the proper way to wrap a Styrofoam cone with cold porcelain clay so you don't end up with cracks or trapped air. Note that the ball of clay she starts with is about equal to the circumference of the shape.

Spanish is the language spoken in this demo but I think you can easily follow what's she's doing even if you don't understand what she's saying!