Badger Bits

I'm starting on another small animal doll - this time a badger.  The head and paws are polymer clay which I've painted with acrylic paints.  I'm really liking this approach.  I do the sculpting simply and with an untextured surface then create the texture (hopefully) with the painting.  The eyes are glass from glasseyesonline.com and they add a sense of life. 

For the claws and nose, I painted interference blue acrylic over the black clay to give a sense of shine on the former and wetness on the latter.

I'm considering having my armature wire go all the way through the feet to anchor in a wood base.  More thinking is required on that.  But I seem to always have a problem towards the end of the project with figuring out how the doll will stand.

The Fox is Felted

 



The felting went smoothly and here's my handsome fox.  He's the Star-Gazer, but besides that, I need to find him a name.  "Simon" just suggested itself to me, so perhaps that will be it - I'll decide by the next post when I'll have him dressed.

I like the way this little fellow's pose turned out, and that was all a result of seemingly endless fiddling with the armature And the tail is nice and fluffy.  Felting right up to the polymer clay head and paws worked out well because the ends of the polymer pieces where they meet the armature are flat.

It will be difficult to decide how to dress him, partly because I am reluctant to cover up much of the felting that I worked so hard on.  But also it will be quite difficult to make kind of jacket for him as the front legs are so far forward on the body.  I guess it's natural that the ease of constructing human type clothes for a creature will be in proportion to how closely the body resembles a human body.  So the clothing design will take quite a bit of pondering before I proceed.

Padding the Armature

 



I have now padded the wire armature with strips of wool felt that I wrapped around the wires and stitched in place.  I chose wool felt so that the wool fiber that I will felt with will stick to the armature.  As I worked on the padding it occurred to me that it would be easier to just wrap the wire with thick wool yarn and tie the ends.  Presumably, the wool fiber would needle felt to the wool yarn just fine.  I'll have to try that and see how it works.  Another advantage might be that wool yard would be easier to find than wool felt.

A Small Fox

 



I would like to create a "product line" of small art dolls - a theme, style, and size that would unify a series of one-of-a-kind animal dolls that I could put in my Etsy shop.  So my idea is small (about 8" tall) animals with polymer clay heads and paws, felted bodies, and rustic "up-cycled" clothing.  I would include foxes, raccoons, badgers, and rabbits and maybe some others.

Although these won't be easy or quick to make, they'll be easier and quicker than the art dolls I often do and they'll give me practice for the more complicated pieces for my NIADA application next year.  I especially need practice on poses and expressions.

So here's my initial attempt.  This fox will be star-gazing.  As planned, her head and paws are polymer clay.  I just used scrap clay in a non-descript gray then painted it.  I get much better details by painting than by trying to use the colors of the clay.  You can see the details in the top phoro of 'her head.  I used 4mm glass eyes from www.glasseyesonline.com.

The armature is number 12 single-strand electrical wire which I glued into the polymer pieces with two-part epoxy glue.  I also used two-part epoxy for gluing the three main strands together - after wrapping them with thin gauge craft wire.

So far, so good.

The Shooting Star and the Fox

I sculpted this little fox a year and a half ago at a polymer clay retreat and have always thought he was something special.  But I didn't know what to do with him until a few days ago.  Working on the wolf and owl pendants - using polymer pieces I had made a while ago in simple bead embroidery pendants - I kept wondering how I could use this fox.  Unlike the other pieces I was working with, the fox is not in the form of a cabochon but is a fully rounded sculpture that I had put a vertical hole through angling from the top of his head to the middle of his back.

Then for some reason I was looking through my vintage glass cabochons when I came across this star and voila!  I teamed the star with bead embroidery to make a shooting star and suspended the little fox from it, like he's reaching for the stars.

My intention has been to list these pendants in my Etsy shop, but this little guy has always been a favorite of mine, so I just may keep him.

The Finished Owl Pendant

Here's the finished owl pendant.  The only thing that's really changed from my last post about this piece is that I finished the peyote stitch bail, backed the pendant with ultrasuede, stitched around the edges, and added the woven leather cord and clasp.

Actually, the color seems different, but it actually isn't.  It's the difference in lighting in the photos.  This one is nicely bright, but too blue and not purple enough....

I like this way of making necklaces - with the leather cord, that is.  It allows me to do a bit of fancy beading without having the necklace overdone.  I think!

Finished Wolf Pendant

This pendant is so darn difficult to photograph.  I sculpted the wolf head from polymer clay then painted it with a paint made from finely ground copper in acrylic resin.  After the copper paint dried I patina'd it with a chemical compound made by the same manufacturer as the copper paint.  The chemical actually oxidizes the copper to a beautiful verdigris.  It's a gorgeous effect, but difficult to capture with the camera.

I've done bead embroidery to complement the wolf, using turquoise beads at the bottom and a flat faceted piece of Peruvian Opal at the top.  The little bit of bead embroidery uses size 11 (eleven beads to the inch) Delica tube beads - a very consistently sized Japanese glass seed bead - in copper-lined glass, bronze, and a few shades of turquoise and green.

I finished the bead embroidery by trimming the backing close, gluing on a piece of ultrasuede, trimming the ultrasuede, then covering the edges with a tightly spaced whip stitch using two strands of embroidery thread.

The bail is peyote stitch worked along a straight row of seed beads at the top of the bead embroidery.  I threaded a beautifully supple piece of braided leather through the bail and finished the necklace with copper cord ends and clasp.