Sculpting with Air Dry Clay: Tips and Materials

Today I'm going to make a little pot plant creature. The intention is for it to be half plant and half creature. Hopefully I can make a little series of sculptures in this theme and this will be the very first one. I've prepared my armature, take an aluminium armature wire and I've twisted it. This enables the clay to grab onto the armature a little bit easier. I've used pliers and I've twisted the armature wire into my desired shape. Then I've attached the armature wire to a little piece of plywood to make everything stick together. I've used a little bit of steel kneaded just to hold it together at the joints. The mesh you see here is also part of the armature and it's aluminium mesh that you can get from most common art supply stores. It's really easy to bend and shape and it just creates a bit of a skeleton before I start adding the clay. The sculpting material I use most often is an oil-based vaseline. Both the advantages and the disadvantages of that material is that it never dries out. So that's really convenient if you want to keep working on a project for a long time or if it's highly detailed and if you intend to create several final copies of that sculpture because you can take a silicon mold of it and then you can cast a resin copy essentially as many times as you like. So if you're creating a sculpture and you want to replicate it 20 times that's definitely the way to go. For this series of sculptures that I'm about to embark on I'm going to try a new material. The material I want to try is different types of air drying clay. The advantage of this is that if you just want to create a one-off sculpture you don't have to bake it, you don't have to take a mold of it, your final sculpture will be your final piece of artwork. The one I'm going to try today is this one. That is all the materials I need to get started and I'm ready to start adding the clay. That's the sculpture finished for now. The next episode is going to be all about painting it, dressing it with fake foliate to truly make the sculpture come to life. If you've enjoyed this first part feel free to subscribe for more videos. If you do have any questions you can add them in the comments below. Thanks for watching!