A Needle Felting First!

I've been doing a lot of needle felting lately.  After creating several mice, a pair of reindeer, a donkey, a meerkat, and a larger reindeer (all of which are in my Etsy shop which you can reach by clicking the link in the right margin of this page), I suddenly realized that I'd never done one of my favorite animals - a polar bear!  So I launched into a new project.

As always, the first step was to create the armature.  As part of that, I made impressively sized polymer clay claws, cured them with heat, then glued them to the toes I had included in the armature.

Next was to begin the wrapping, which you see here.  You can also see, in the background, a print-out of an image of a polar bear skeleton that I found on the web.  I use images of an animal's skeleton to plan and build my armatures, figuring if it's a good foundation for the real animal, it's also a good foundation for the needle-felted one.

Just as an aside, I've been thinking for a few months now that I'd like to do some instructional videos for needle felting and clay sculpting and maybe a few other things.  Maybe after the new year I'll look into that - think it would be fun...