Polymer clay is a fantastic medium, because it’s so versatile. You can not only make jewellery with it, but decorate boxes and bottles, hair clips, journals and you can create sculptures with polymer clay.
I always enjoyed creating sculptures with ordinary clay which you fire in the kiln, glaze and fire again. However having your own pottery kiln requires space – which I don’t have – and a lot of money. So the next best thing is doing a pottery course, but then you rely on getting your work fired somewhere else.
This is why for me polymer clay is a viable alternative for small scale sculptures. Of course bigger pieces are also possible, however polymer clay isn’t that cheap and I tend to use my small table top oven for baking my pieces. Bigger sculpts just don’t fit in it.
Two methods of creating polymer clay sculptures.
There are different methods for creating sculptures with polymer clay. You can either use the clay in the various colours they come in and work with these colours – this is the method or you can just use clay in a neutral colour and paint over it with acrylic paint – this is great if you are trying to achieve a realistic look. I am using both methods for my sculptures.
The painted sculptures tend to take longer to make than the coloured ones, which explains their higher price. You can find out more about the latter method in this blog post.
As you might have already noticed I like animals – especially cats, so cat sculptures are dominating my collection. However you will also find creatures such as sloths, a meerkat, octopuses, dragons, hedgehogs, foxes, a horse, a unicorn, a cheetah, a gecko and dogs.
I also take on commissions – because they are very time consuming to make prices for commissions for bigger sculptures start at £50 and depend on the complexity involved. For more information on commissions click here.
At some point I will also try my hand at sculptures of humans.
