How to Sculpt a Dog out of Polymer Clay

Hello and welcome to Mini Chef's how-to videos with myself, Elizabeth. Today we're going to be making a dog. There's a few things you're going to need so I'll go over those and then we can start. You'll need some clay or some polymer, play-doh. You can use mud too but it won't hold up as well. Saran wrap, not saran wrap, tinfoil. Some toothpicks, a potter's needle, but you can use toothpicks as well for that. Some sort of silicone dowel tool and maybe a little bald end type, but you can also use a pen tip for that. And an X-Acto knife or you can use a butter knife, just don't use it for food after you've used it for clay. And I've got these tools, I'll include a link to my tools in the description down below. But let's start. All right, I'm gonna make the classic brown lab today. You can make whatever dog you want, whatever color. We're gonna start by taking our clay and warming it up. I use Sculpey clay. It's a type of polymer and it comes in all sorts of colors. Here we go. As you're warming it up, you can think about your dog, what sort of features it's gonna have. All right, set that there for a second. Take some tinfoil and just take a little bit of tinfoil out. We're going to cut about this much. Roll it into a teardrop shape. Take some of our clay that we want for a dog color, about that much. And you can make your dog bigger or smaller than this. It all depends on what you want to do. I'll show you again what I did. Roll it into a ball, flatten it between your fingers, and then set the tinfoil in the center and fold that clay over like so. This is the beginning of our dog's head. It'll be a narrow oval. You can just smooth the clay out. See those lines there? I'm wanting to smooth those out. Smoothing them. Now, once you have it as an oval, I like to take these two fingers and pinch down a little bit on the front. Give it a nuzzle. There we go. Like that. Got our dog head here. Now that we've got this, we're going to take our dowel tool and make a little dot on either side of our nose. Then you can take your toothpick and stick it into there like so. Take this again and widen the hole a little bit. What we're going to do is take some white clay, warm it up, roll it into a ball, split the ball in half, roll that into two, and then you see what happened here? The brown clay got on my white clay because I was working with brown clay. White clay is easily tarnished. It gets stuff on it really easily. You can do that again if that happens to you. I'm going to take those circles and pop them in the holes like so. You can take your pen or your dowel tool and press into the center of the white. Set them back down again. I think I will mix a little bit of brown and a little bit of black together to make my dog's eyes a little bit darker than his skin color. You can make whatever color eyes you want. You could do one eye blue, one eye brown, purple eyes, any color eyes you want. All right, once we have our color mixed, that's a little darker, I'm going to take a little less than we took for the white, roll it into a ball, split it into two, roll those again, and one may turn out bigger than the other, but just roll them until you have about the same size. Set it up to the white and see if that's too much, too little. That's a little much for my dog, so here's the trick you can do. Take your brown or your eye color, take your knife, and cut a little bit off. And now we can re-roll those like so. Set them back in there, see if it fits. Yes, I like that much better. There we go. All right, now we're going to take our dowel or a pen one last time and make another little divot in the center. Take just a tiny bit of black clay, or if you want your dog to have really big pupils you can take more, roll it into a ball. Now this time you may need to cut it in half like so. Roll them each and then place them in the center of the eyes. And if they're like mine, they may be different sizes, so I'm going to carefully take a tiny, take my black off. So don't squish it in until you have the desired size. I should have said that before, but hindsight it is 20-20. So here we go. I'm going to redo it, and if you squish it in it's no problem. All right, there's my dog so far. I'm going to take some brown and give him some features. I'm going to take a little bit of clay here, about this much, roll it out into a little snake, and set it over his eye. It should be like my dog has a thick brow. And then over the other eye, and his head's a little flat, so I'm going to add a bit more clay here, rolling it into a ball like so, setting it in there, and that's adding more volume to his head. Now we can take our pen tool or our potter's needle or toothpick and smooth those lines together. Like that. There we go, he's coming together. And then we can take our clay and about as much as the muzzle, split it into two, roll those into balls, and then we're going to make triangles and flatten those triangles between our fingers to make the ears. Then, if they're too small, we can add some more clay and redo. Take clay and roll it into balls, make a triangle, flatten the triangle, set the ears on our dog. Or you can have floppy ears, spiky ears, have fun figuring out how you want the ears of your doggo to be, and just shape it until it looks right to you. If you're basing this off a dog, I recommend looking, if you have a picture of the dog, and looking how far apart their ears are on top of their head, are they really close together? Are they really far apart? Do they droop way down low? Maybe they do. Maybe they're up here. Maybe they're really close to their eyes. Maybe they're far back. It all depends on the dog. So, like so. And then we are going to add a nose. Take about as much clay as you did for the eye, roll it into a ball, and then pinch it between your fingers. I'll show you that again. Roll it into a ball, pinch it between your fingers, make it like that, and then flatten it to make the nose. And then you can take this tool and push slightly in, like that, ever so slightly. It gives our dog a place to breathe. Now we can take our potter's needle or a toothpick and draw a little line right there on both sides. And here, if you want your dog's mouth to be open, you can add a little bit of clay to the bottom, like so, and then push the pen tool in and then stick a tongue in there if you want. I'm going to wait until I have the body on to see what my dog wants to do. So now that we have the head, we can take some more tinfoil, mush it up, and then we're going to make a silicone with it. Like so. Take some more of the body color of the dog, warm it up, and make it out into a little sheet, like so. Stick the tinfoil in the center, cover it, and smooth the lines together, like so. And you see, this will be our dog's body. He's laying down, sitting, standing. I'm going to have mine sitting. I'll place it on the body, like so. Take a toothpick and see about how far the toothpick will go up. We want it to go about halfway into the head and not all the way down on the body. So I'm going to cut it to right about here. You can snap it and then stick it in the body, like so, one way, and then pull it out and push it down in there. And then, so the pointy end is up, you're going to put the head on. There you go. Now you can smooth the lines together. So our neighbor's mowing his lawn, so you might hear that. I'm sorry. I've decided on here, but his forehead still needs to be a little bit different. So I'm going to add some clay over top and then smooth it back in. Okay, now your dog is going to look a little choppy here, but that's okay. I'm going to set him down and take some clay and roll it out into little sticks or little snakes. Set it up on the body, like so, and pull it off about that far. Pull this part over to make the paw, and do that on the other side. All right, now that we have that, we can take some more, take it about the flat piece. I accidentally got some white in there, but it's okay because and cover the legs of the dog's chest. And this depends if your dog has a skinny chest, and if you want to make skinnier legs, you can make skinnier legs. It's all up to you. There you go, like so. And then you can smooth in everything. And if you want to make the lines super smooth, you can, but if you want to leave them a little bit choppy, we can add more detail in later, fur detail. But if you want to leave your dog a smooth dog, then smooth in all those lines. And I'm fixing his ear. All right, now that we have that part, I'm going to take about the same amount and roll it into a snake again. Stick it right here, fold it over, and then fold that part, like so. Smooth that in, set him down. Now I've run out of clay, so I need to take a little bit more. Make sure to warm up your clay. Okay, now roll it into a snake again, set it on the side down below here, fold it over, see if it's the same as the other side. Yep, looks good. Pinch it off a little bit there, and then fold the foot over. Now, if it's much bigger, like mine is, you can roll it out a little bit again, refold it, and pinch it off again, like so. Okay, now for the tail. We're going to roll out a little snake again. I'm going to make my dog with a long tail, but to do a short tail, you can just roll a little ball and plop it on the back. Or to do a mid-sized tail, you can roll even shorter. You can just stick it right there and have it wagging. All right, to make it a big fluffy tail, you can add even more clay, whatever you'd like. Okay, now that we have the basic foundation of a dog, let's take our toothpick, tool, or potter's needle, stick it into the white clay. There's a tiny bit of white clay I got on there. We're going to place that onto the eye of the dog. He's giving puppy dog eyes. I'll do it again, like so. All right, now if the hair comes too far onto your dog's eye, you can pull it back a little bit like that. If you want your dog to have eyebrows, you can take your toothpick and make little eyebrows. If you want your dog to have hair or to have the look of hair, you can take your toothpick and make little dashes on the dog. This may take a while, depending on how big you've made your dog, but it gives it a fun effect. And if you want your dog to be more floofy in different places, you can add more clay. If your dog has like one tuft of hair that goes off in some fun way, you can do that. You can also take your dowel tool and make little swoops in your dog and make hair that way, like that. Or you can do both, the little swoops and just ever so lightly add little fine hairs inside those swoops, like so. There's all sorts of ways to do it, and there's all sorts of dogs. Just keep going and have fun. Now, before I forget, you bake Sculpey at 275 for 15 minutes per quarter inch. That's the type of clay I use. And in a normal oven, and it's all good. If you want, you can add a color to your dog. I might add a pink color to mine. You take a really small sliver, not sliver, take a little small snake, roll it out, flatten it between your fingers, excuse me, and then you can wrap it around. See about how far it is? And you can make a little mark with your nail to set it back down. Take your knife and cut where that mark is, like so. There's a collar. You can also add little tiny bits to the dog's collar, like a little roll out a tiny bit of black, and then fold it here, so it looks like a buckle with a collar. Difficult here, but getting there. This is where you can use your toothpick. Set it in place, and then for the collar spot, you can do that. You can also take another tiny piece, put it across the collar like so, and then if you want to mix some gray, I mean, you can make some gray by mixing white and black together. Mixing it together, and then you can roll a little ball with that. Almost mixed. Pull the ball, flatten the ball, set it right below the collar, place a tiny little hole in there, and just a tiny tiny bit more clay right there to make the tag attached to the collar, and then if you're able, you can write your dog's name right in there, but I'll just do some squiggles because mine's too small, and then you can keep adding texture to your dog. You can add spots to your dog. Here, I'll show you. Just take a little bit of clay, add some spots, smooth them in so they don't fall off. You can also take your dowel tool or your pen, smooth them in, and add the hair, and just keep having fun. If you like this video, like it and subscribe to see more. Share with folks that you know might like it, and I'd love to see photos of the dogs you guys make. You can comment down below, or tag my Instagram account, Minishop, or message me, or post it to my Facebook page on Minishop, and just have some fun. Bye, guys. Thanks for watching.