Mermaid Cove: Things Learned

1. Using Baby Oil. I’ve never used Baby Oil on my pieces to the extent of using it as a smoothing agent for uncured clay. On this piece I tried and and found out it’s better to add absolutely all the clay details you want your piece to have before applying the Baby Oil. If you don’t, your clay will become very mushy and your fingers will erase those details you worked hard on as you’re holding your sculpture with one hand and applying the Baby Oil with the other.

2. I had another first; after researching this method, I decided to try my hand at rooting the mohair onto the uncured clay head instead of gluing wefts of hair onto the cured head. I have to say the results were vastly better than wefting. Looks far more natural to me.

3. Yet another first here was using faux water. I also did a good amount of research on which product would be the best and I ended up trying Magic Water. One thing I do want to caution you on is when you pour the two mixes together, begin mixing immediately and gently so as to avoid bubbles and a foggy mix.

4. I used Sculpey Gloss Glaze on their hair to give it that wet look and it worked out great.

5. When rooting the hair on uncured clay heads, do not let the head sit unfinished for too long or depending on the clay, it will slightly harden and may slightly crack in the places where you rooted hair.

6. For the sand at the bottom I first added some hair spray on the glass so the sand would have something to stick to. I then poured the desired sand then sprayed a layer of fixative from a safe distance away so the spray wouldn’t blow the sand away. At this point it was ready to have the faux water poured on it without moving the sand around.

7. The tails were painted with Black acrylic paint so I also sprayed them with fixative to seal in the acrylic paint and let it dry. I did this so when it came time to putting a layer of Gloss Glaze to make the tails look wet and shiny, the Black paint wouldn’t smear.

Here’s the finished piece –

Many more images & a video at: http://www.fdmj-creations.org/010-008-mermaid-cove.html

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