Susan's February Tip: Armature Strengthening

Hi! Today's Creative Paperclay® modeling material tip is brought to you from a cold and icy Susan! I hope you stopped by the Valentine's Blog Hop and seen the Design Team's awesome tutorials and projects! If not, what are you waiting for, go, now!  For my project, I made Bob. He's a sweet alien all dressed for Valentine's day.  There's a lot of pictures of Bob along the way, but I wanted to take a moment to call out one of the armature building steps.

One of the my favorite features of Creative Paperclay® modeling material is its strength after it is dried. Another of my favorite features of the clay is its ability to adhere to itself. Combining these two features in a multi-step sculpting process creates a nice solid piece. In this photo, you'll see where I reenforced all of the seams between the egg shape and the shaker pegs with clay.

Once that dried, I had an incredibly stable surface to sculpt on. I didn't have to worry about putting too much pressure on the glued on pieces and having them pop off (yeah, that's happened more than once on other projects!)

For his feet and ears, I repeated the same tactic. I attached the pieces with hot glue to hold them still, then covered them with clay to make them a forever part of the sculpt.

It does take a bit a patience. In this case it added two days of drying time between steps. I think it can be worth it though. I handled him with reckless abandon as well as had one big ugly drop. He's all in one piece!

So tell me - you do have any tricks for making your sculptures strong?