Before we go any further we need to talk about tools.
They can be as basic or as sophisticated, as many or as few as your pocket or conscience allows. Bill Horan famously uses cocktail sticks, often shaped or whittled for one specific task. There are many tools you will already have such as a scalpel with various blades. Sewing needles are good and very cheap even if you don’t have a SWMBO who sews. I have a large selection fitted into pin vices as handles, but you can just push them into a piece of dowel, or fill the end of an old pen with Milliput and poke a needle into it. A set of bigger darning needles is very useful. I have a couple of specially designed teflon tools which I have hardly ever used, and some miniature screwdrivers that are good for flat shapes. There are some very nice stainless steel dental tools (expensive) and wax sculpting tools (cheaper but just as good). I do like these for working with Milliput because it is easy to clean the cured putty off without damaging the tool. For bigger stuff there are clay modelling tools in wood and plastic, and I even have a set of plastic cake-decorating tools which were very cheap on fleabay. I have only used one or two of the sensible shaped ones but still…
And there are the silicon rubber clay shapers, which were terribly expensive when I bought them years ago but have come down in price by now. They come in different sizes and grades of firmness, and I found them difficult to get on with when sculpting Milliput, but I am using them pretty much exclusively for the Bees Putty. Interestingly I would have expected to use mostly the small sizes, but I am actually preferring the larger sizes for most work, but we will come to that later.
As I have said before, I am very much a carver by nature, in that I usually just roughly model the Milliput, let it cure and then post-finish it with scalpel, file and wet & dry. Polymer clay requires you to be more of a modeller, getting it right from the outset, so I am out of my comfort zone with this aspect of sculpting. Especially with the surface finish, but again, we will come to that later. The advantage of polymer clay over epoxy putty like Milliput is that you have absolutely unlimited working time, you can even leave it for days and pick up where you left off, whereas with epoxy clay you only have a window of about an hour and half to two hours, and the putty is gradually getting firmer all the while. Now there are many advantages to this as well, as you can exploit the gradual firming up for different processes, but you can only work on a small area at a time. Then again that’s not necessarily a problem because it means you are less like to damage the model while working on another area. It’s very easy to squish something you’ve spent hours getting just right if you’re not careful.
And of course epoxy putty is rather nasty for the skin when you are mixing it- I always wash my hands immediately and scrub with a nail brush before I do any sculpting.
There are other epoxy putties than Milliput, such as Magicsculp, Apoxysculp, A&B putty, Duro (GreenStuff). There are some fast setting plumbers’ repair putties which I use sometimes at the armature stage, but they are bit too fast for careful work. They all work in the same way, being two components which get kneaded together in equal quantities which starts the curing process. Each have their own slightly f different properties and some people mix two different ones together for different effects.
Polymer clays such as Fimo, Sculpy and now Bees Putty don’t require mixing but they need to be baked in a domestic oven to cure them. We will find out how well they respond to sanding carving and filing…. And of course they are kinder to the skin.
Next up- anatomy
thanks for looking
Neil
