The Making of Clay Silver

Instructions

This is my process of making a clay sculpture of Silver! For those who don't know, Silver is my main oc. She's a sort of horse/dragon thing and is blue. Previously, I had made a clay Silver using air-dry clay, but that was before I had discovered Sculpey polymer clay (I <3 SCULPEY!!) Sculpey is SO MUCH EASIER to work with than air-dry clay, and doesn't harden until you bake it! So I wanted to do a long and high-quality project to make Silver out of clay and paint her. This is a larger-scale and higher-quality sculpture than any of the clay projects I've done previously, so I just wanted to have fun and try some new skills (like sculpting hair!) The final result isn't perfect, but I think it's pretty cool and I had fun making it! Without further ado, onto the process pics! 1-2. The very beginning of Silver! I started with a rough armature made with wire and tin foil, and began sculpting a head onto it 3. Removed the head to pose the armature. Also added wings! 4-6. Adding clay, building up the body shape, getting it into the pose I wanted 7-8. Wings!! I spent a while sculpting all the individual feather details on and I think they look awesome 9-10. She has seen unspeakable horrors 11. >:( 12. Eye is finally looking normal after... whatever those other pics were 13-14. Her face was a little bit too wide... so surgically removed some of the extra clay. By this point, I had also added some more definition to the face 15-17. Sorry I got bad at taking pictures after this point. Fast-forward to the end of sculpting: I finished the body, added some muscle definition, baked her once, and added her hair. Also got her wings to stay put, which was its own hassle. The sculpting's done now, and she's ready for her final bake! 18. PAINT TIME!! I used my airbrush to get her base coat, blaze+underbelly, and shading on. Her base is light blue and her light markings are light blue, and then I used a dark blue to add the shading. 19. Meet my airbrush! It's just a silly little guy 20. Done with the airbrush painting! I did another layer of her base color to blend in the shading, and a little more light blue to touch up the light spots 21. Next I added her markings with a paintbrush. I had metallic gold paint, so doing her horns was fun. Her back pattern and the stripes by her feet were hard to get neat though 22. The wings return!! To add some definition to my feather sculpting, I used a watered-down dark blue and brushed it over the wings. Then I used a paper towel to blot up the paint that was on the raised areas, leaving only the dark paint in the lower spots 23-24. Painted her hair and her eyes, and now she's done! I made sure to add some shading to the hair to make all the sculpting I did stand out! 25-26. New Silver next to old Silver. New Silver took like 10 times longer to make, but is a much better quality! 27-36. Photoshoot! 37. Drawing of Clay Silver in my digital art style! You can flip back and forth and compare the digital and clay versions That's all! She turned out pretty cool, and I think this was a useful learning project! I also paint model horses but haven't gotten into resculpting them yet, so doing this hair practice on a low-stakes project is a good test to see if I would want to sculpt horse manes in the future! It's also so cool to see this creation that is entirely mine: the design, the sculpture, everything. It's awesome to see the results creativity can bring-- maybe this will inspire you to make something of your own that's just as amazing!