Miniatures and dollshouses : clay

Techniques

Modelling clay

1 - Air dry clay : like DAS , Plastiroc or Darwi.

To choose for a mate look (bread, for example) or when one wants to make many final improvements. There is clear gray or color terracotta clay for making flowers pots or floor tiles.
Warning, to preserve it in a hermetic box, a rubber bottle or a well screwed lid bottle.
Very practical, one can make final improvements as many as one wants after drying, and to easily sandpaper it. It is painted with water paint or acrylic paint, and gloss.
(I used the papier-mâché very a long time ago, I completely gave up it)

For the kitchen utensils, it is easier with a mould : use small plastic dinette, blisters pack, stoppers and all kinds of bottles and tubes....

One can carry out all that is not out of wood...
The teapots and the cauldron are modelled on a ball of plastic clay which is extracted after drying.

The moulding of flat forms
One takes the print in Fimo (cooked then) on small objects.
One can then use these moulds with dry clay, for example to make the decorations of these pots or to mould plates.

Pottery with potter's wheel :
My tests with a child potter's wheel, with battery, noisy and which does not turn completely round.... Thus it is not very round, and I think that natural clay is more malleable than dry clay.

2 - Polymer clays to cook with 130°

To choose for objects with a smooth and gloss look. It is as more elastic and plastic as the dry clay, which makes it possible for example to carry out vases or jugs into only once.
- Fimo
There are 2 kinds: the Software easy to model and Traditional, the hardest when it is raw.
- Sculpey (not of colors).
- Sculpey III : much too soft, and even sticking.
- Premo! Firmer Sculpey.
- Cernit (I do not know it).

For the dolls and characters
(approximately in 500g pack and in flesh color)
- Puppenfimo, become Doll Fimo (news formulates)
- Super Sculpey or
- Sculpey LivingDoll

ther is flesh color Fimo, perfect for characters with porcelain look.

There is also liquid Fimo or TLS (Translucent Liquid Sculpey), more difficult to find in shops.
One can use it to make transfers, to construct stained glasses, to fill the bottles rather than to prepare resin for some drops, to make bottles or small mouldings, jam or sauce and to assemble the parts of a modelling......

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