How to Make A Polymer Clay Figure Armature

January 14th, 2009 admin Posted in Articles | Comments Off

torty2finished Want to learn the process from beginning to end in making a sculpey figure? Than you've come to the right place. Obviously from above you can see I don't know how to paint, but this isn't a tutorial about painting, it's about sculpting.

My clay of choice is Super Sculpey(not the regular white sculpey, it's far to sticky).

To complete this tutorial you will need Super Sculpey, tinfoil, wire(medium thickness), tape, and glue. Oh yeah, pencil and paper.

First thing you want to do is draw your figure to scale. Since Sculpey needs to bake in an oven, most likely your piece won't be bigger than 12 inches or so, or will be made in multiple pieces. What you need to do is draw a to scale replica of your figure.

torty1

As you can see I drew the figure, than drew a stick representation of the armature. An armature is basically the bones of the sculpture that will help support it.

The picture also includes the next steps which is piecing together your armature. My armature isn't too advanced since turbit doesn't have any complex joints, so I just taped the joints and then wrapped them with tape.

Next step is to wrap the bulk of the character in tinfoil. When baking Sculpey you only want thin layers no thicker than a quarter of an inch. So bulk your figure out.

torty2

After that it's sculpting time. This isn't a tutorial on sculpting, so I will let your imagine run with it. Just get your tools and your fingers loosened up and build it. One tip is to use rubbing alcohol to smooth out the clay. Also, use your drawing as reference while you sculpt.

Doing this will provide a more complete figure that can be better anatomically, and can support many different configurations, and wild joints and limbs.

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