Working With Air-Dry Clay: Art Dolls

"Spring" by Tireless Artist

The Tireless Artist shares her tips for working with air-dry clay when creating art dolls plus some additional tips for saving and restoring "old" clay.

To quote the artist (Dorote): "I can’t describe happiness and excitement when I discovered art dolls. I think this is most complicated and interesting art ever. The doll artist has to be also a sculptor and a painter and hairdresser and couture and also needs knowledge of working with different materials and making different accessories. Doll making is my full time occupation now."

Tell Us About Your Blog or Website

Do you have a blog or website about air-dry clay?  It can be about the dolls you create or other clay projects or maybe you're a supplier of clay and clay tools.   Anything that talks about air-dry, self-hardening and no-bake clays is welcome to add a link to their site here.  We all share a common interest, so let's get acquainted. Add a link and we can visit each other.  I'll get it started by listing my other clay sites!

School Grade and Artist Grade No-Bake Clays

Self-hardening, no-bake, air-dry clays have been around a long time, but these were mostly 'school quality' clays intended for children and not suitable for detailed sculpting or fine art. In recent years, many "new" clays have become available and that's what this blog is all about...the "new" clays!    Due to the rising popularity of air-dry clays, now we have clays that are a much finer quality and are suitable for fine art.  However, the quality and characteristics vary greatly from brand to brand and the artist must do their own research before buying.

Clearing Up Some Mis-information About ADC

Happy Independence Day to our friends in USA!

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I'm going to take an opportunity today to rant a little!   Hope you don't mind!  I'm tired of seeing websites passing out mis-information about air-dry clay and I want to set the record straight.

I do a lot of searching and surfing for new air-dry clay information and tutorials and in the past week or two I've come across a number of websites writing about air-dry clay but they don't really know what they're talking about.  These sites are passing around bad information.  It's become my new pet-peeve!

Make a Cute Reindeer

Today we have a video demo showing you how to create a cute little reindeer with polymer clay.  But this blog is suppose to be about air-dry clay, right?   It is.   This demo is a good one to use as an example of how to modify a polymer clay tutorial when using air dry clay.   The types of air-dry clays that work best for this sort of project are the soft, pre-colored clays such as Makin's Clay, Hearty Clay,

Create these cute dolls with cold porcelain or other air-dry clay.
http://www.mulhercriativa.com.br/biscuit/casal-teen

Materials needed are pre-tinted clay in white, black, blue, yellow, red, brown, green and flesh plus barbeque skewers or lollipop sticks for legs.

Page is written in Portuguese, but lots of good photos show step-by-step without translating ....or use Google Translate. http://translate.google.com/

How to Make a Strand of Clay Flowers

This is a 2-part video from msedcolor (Simply Chic Lily) demonstrating how to make simple flowers and then connect them into a strand of flowers.

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!