Sunday, May 17, 2009

Clay Craters

I made some craters out of clay. They took about 5-10 minutes each. The only problem I had was they tend to warp while drying, so I had to sand them down a bit on the bottom. They still wobble a bit so I'm going to patch greenstuff over them to fix that, and to add some asymmetry to them. The double crater developed a crack so I have to patch that up too. After I'm done fixing them, I'm going to paint them to match my table.





I also finished up the bases for my ruined temple heads (like Easter Island heads), but I have to do some battle damage effects before I can glue those on.

(Note that this is not Sculpey or a similar air-dry clay, this is a stoneware clay body, the same stuff used to make pottery.)

Here is how I made them: I took my clay and rolled it out into a slab about 1" thick. I then pressed a curved plaster mold into the clay. With the mold in place I used my thumb to push down the outside into the outward slope. To make them uneven I used my fingers to stretch them out a bit. Finally, I used a loop tool to scrape down the sides to give it texture. After they dried, I sanded the bottoms and fired them. I assume you can make these using air dry clay, they'll just be a little more fragile.

4 comments:

  1. Great work! I have some of this coloured clay myself so I might try and give this a go as they look really effective. Thanks for sharing

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  2. unforgivenangels, are you using an air dry or sculpey type clay, or are we talking the fire-in-the-kiln kind? Either way, I edited my post explaining how I made them. These are made out of stoneware clay so they are really strong, but an air-dry body would work too.

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  3. They look great.
    Shame about the warping. I imagine that with an air dry clay, you could add a hard base that would keep it from warping. Not sure how you could do that with fire-in-the-kiln clay.

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  4. There's a couple of tricks to prevent it from warping, I just didn't use them in this case because I didn't think they'd warp. Next time I make them I'll be more careful.

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