Creative Paperclay® air dry modeling material: How to Create a Bas Relief Sculpture: Revisited

Thursday, February 24, 2022

How to Create a Bas Relief Sculpture: Revisited

Hello everyone, Cinnamon here and I am going to show you how I created this relief sculpture portrait.

I've done this tutorial sometime last year for the piece on the left, but I wanted to revisit this project to push the details a bit further. It's always a good idea to be critical of your work and see where you can make improvements as an artist.

Supplies:

Creative Paperclay®
Small hand roller or something to flatten out clay
Exacto knife
Sand paper
Wire bristle brush
Saran wrap
plastic knife

I chose to create my own silhouette from an image I found online in a computer illustrating program, you can make a sketch by hand if you want instead. This is a portrait from the project when I first did I last year. I chose to add some flowers to the neckline.

I took the silhouette and printed it out to the size that I wanted the portrait to be. Again, you can just do this by hand and not get on the computer to do this step if you choose. I put some saran wrap over the print so that the clay doesn't stick to the paper. This allows me to move my piece around and be able to check the progress without damaging the paper guide underneath.

I began to take my clay and started working on the shape over the portrait guide. You can use a plastic knife or anything that allows you to sculpt little details while the clay is still pliable. It's important to get your basic shape down at this point so that you don't have to do as much sanding and cutting into the clay later.

Keep building up the piece and focus on getting the profile to the point where you would like it to be.

I used this ball point tool to add some texture to the hair by slightly pressing it into the clay

I knew that I wanted the piece to have a headband and a lot more details then the last one, so I kept building the pieces up as I went long and making adjustments as I go.

Here I am experimenting with adding flowers to the base of the sculpt and I started experimenting with earrings to add to the piece. I also filled in some of the face like in the cheek area and around the forehead.

I was not happy with the hair at this point, I used this wire bristle brush to add some texture for a new hairstyle.

I changed the hairstyle into dreadlocks to challenge myself since I've never sculpted them before. I used the wire brush here to give the type of texture that looked like real hair to me for the dreads. I set the piece aside to allow it to dry. I changed the earrings as well.