Early Thoughts About Polymer Clay
I Didn't Have The Knack - But It Was Fun Anyway!
This is the mission debriefing for my little experiment using something that I have never crafted with before - Polymer Clay. And as the above heading suggests, I didn't exactly take to this new medium like a duck would to water!
Oh, there was mistakes, and realisations, and more mistakes. I guess I fell fowl of my own misconseptions that polymer clay was a 'kids thing', somewhat akin to plastacine, but which you could harden into a permanent model. Because of this I went into this exeriment thinking that this would be easy...
How wrong was I! 😐
Like every craft there is a knack and it took me several video tutorials to start to feel a bit more comfortable sculpting with this strange stuff...
My introduction to this clay was not a smooth start and my first hicup was nothing to do with my unfamiliarity with sculpting with this medium. Instead, I made the schoolboy error of buying the cheapest polymer clay available in my town (actualy, it was the only polymer clay available in my town) as I didn't want to wait until pay day when I could afford a good quality brand.
Predictably, the cheap stuff was rubbich an did not stay firm enough to do detailed and sharp sculpting with. Still, I used it to practise with until I could get some FIMO Pro clay (recommended).
I did better once I had the good quality clay and was quite please with some of the little models that I did. You can kind of tell which ones were done exclusively with the cheap clay and which were done with teh FIMO clay.
The Biggest Problem - For Me
After doing a few small models - following some of the tutorials that I found on YouTube - I kind of got the hang of modelling with the clay and found some of the pitfalls and some of the tricks of sculpting with it.
However, while I could see me improving my skills with practise, one major issue persisted and I could see it plaguing me repeatedly - and that was the problem of keeping your polymer clay clean!
I'm not saying that I am generally a grubby person - through my wife and daughter would probably disagree - but as a guy that is a bit of a crafting hobby nut and does all sorts of different types of modelling at the same time I do pick up quite a lit of grime and dust. I just can't avoid it as I am constantly sanding or painting or trimming or cutting all sorts of different materials during the course of the day.
I usually have some spots of paint or muck smeared over me from something I was doing and however much I tried to wash and wipe my hands I would inevitably transfer some microscopic particals of dirt to the pristine polymer clay that I was sculptig with... Using white clay was an absolute nightmare.
I did look up ways to clean your clay (isopropol on a cotton bud is a good way to clean up some of the surface stains) but in the end I just had to accept that I attact grime like some sort of fleshy dirt magnet!!!
This spoils the clean flat colour look that is one of the great features of making models with polymer clay. It niggled me to no end to finish a nice model only for me to spy one small spec of dirt somewhere.
So, that experiment done I shall now move on to the next sculpting medium that I want to try - air dry clay. And this has the advantage that it does not come in different coloured types, just basic tones so you have to finish your sculpt by painting it.
Perhaps this will be better for me as I will more easily keep the final model dirt free?
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