How to Make Clay Carnations

Here's a step-by-step tutorial for creating clay Carnations by Priya Nanthakumar  using air-dry clay.   The result is quite realistic.

 Priya doesn't say which air-dry clay is being used but many brands would be
suitable.  Cold porcelain and the softer clays would probably work the best.

 Here's a few tool tips for this tutorial:

Author recommends oil paints to pre-tint the clay but acrylic paints may also be used.   Artists quality oils and acrylics will give you stronger reds and dark colors than craft paints.   If you want pastel pinks or yellows, craft acrylics could be used instead of the tube paints.

Another option for pre-tinting your air-dry clay would be the paste colorants used by sugarcraft and cake artisans.   Wilton is a well-known brand, but there are a few others such as AmeriColor.

There are a few brands of air-dry clay that are available pre-colored, such as Cloud Clay, DecoClay, Model Magic, Makin's Clay and others.  One of the advantages of tinting your own clay is that you can create some natural-looking varigated color.  In this tutorial, some of the petals are just tipped in pink instead of being solid pink.

This Carnation tutorial uses a circle cutter and a leaf cutter.   There's a lot of things around the kitchen you could substitute for the circle cutter, even an empty can.   But you can also make your own cutters following instructions from these tutorials. Click here to make your own cutters from aluminum sheets or click here to make a leaf cutter for free out of cardboard.

You could always purchase a set of cutters, too.   Wilton makes an inexpensive Flower-Making Set (shown at left) that includes plastic leaf and petal cutters and some other tools, plus an instruction book full of great flowers to make!

Another tool called for is a leaf veiner.    If you don't have one, just go outside and find a large, green leaf to use for embossing leaf veins.   I wouldn't worry too much about it being an actual "Carnation" leaf....as long as the leaf has well-defined veins.   ;-)   If you have a molding compound...make your own re-usable veiner by making a mold of an actual leaf!

A knitting needle could substituted for the frilling tool.

That about sums it up for the tools needed....so there's no excuse now not to make some pretty Carnations!   (Well, except maybe getting the time to actually DO it!   LOL)