Mike Sandals

I've been working a little bit on a clay figure based on one of my friend's characters.
 Here's some pics of him so far. Sorry for the bad lighting and slight blurriness. I need to stop working on art at night. I can't possibly get good pictures of the stuff I work on.

The Finished Dragons

I hate updating with half finished stuff so I skipped updating for the last few days in order to actually complete the little project that I was working on. I admit that I need to work a little more on getting the nail holes in the backs aligned a little bit better.

Here they are  little more in context with my shelf. It is only know that I realize that of all the things to include in the pic, the last should be all of the girly anime I own. I swear I have other better stuff just off screen!

 

And here are close ups of all of the individual dragon things. They are made of nothing but sculpey clay with some foil and wire as the armatures. Painted with acrylic and then glossed. The plaques are wood I got from the craft store. 

 

They don't seem to be very fragile, but I would still be careful with them. Next time I will be sure to try to build them even sturdier.

Dragon Heads

Me messing with some clay and paint. Maybe I can make some tiny mounted heads or something.

I will update in the morning with better photos.

Vacation

Look at my red wall! So yes, I was on vacation for a little while. Making a terribly low amount of art things.
I was able to do a few pieces of ceramic pottery. The clay was fun to work with but some of the glazes didn't turn out how I thought they would. The blue monster was supposed to be shiny. Oh well.

I also did a few little monster things like these, which wasn't really the best idea. Ceramics is different from sculpey and isn't made for small stuff like this. So they broke a little. I will make some sculpey versions later.

Only a Quick update

I haven't been able to do as much art as I've been wanting to. My English writing class has kept me pretty busy and probably will keep me busy for the next few weeks. I get some art in every day, but definitely not as much as I would like.

Oh and that key-chain I showed last Friday? It's actually having bits fall off of it. The small details (hair and horns) chip off. I only varnished with one coat, so I will see if putting another coat on will fix that.

Messing with Paintbrushes

I'm still learning how to use a lot of features in Photoshop. The variety of brushes alone would cause me to spend weeks coloring one thing a hundred different ways. So here's one way I colored this guy that I liked. I'm definitely going to still mess with it a lot.

Oh and here's some step by step pics of a charm I made:

 Above, this is it plain and unbaked. I use Super Sculpey Firm. It's great for doing detail work.

 Here it is after being baked and painted with a base coat of white. All I have for paint is acrylic, so it is as this point that it loses its nice clay look and starts looking like plastic.

And here it finally is painted and varnished. Like most of my art at this point, everything I did with this is still an experiment. I now know that:
1. I should get smaller brushes for painting stuff in this scale. 
2. The paint will take forever to dry on the figure, but will dry too fast on my paint-paper.
3. Speaking of paint, I need to find something else that doesn't make my stuff look like a cheap plastic junk.
4. Varnish will pool in annoying places and if I touch it at all after I brush it on it will peel off.

In the next few days I will see how well this guy holds up to being a key-chain, banging around on my bag. I'm gonna be so kewl at school with this guy. Maybe the next one I make will be better, with more wire reinforcement. And glitter. Glitter all over it.