Cute Critter Week ~ Rainbow Unicorn Tutorial

How to Create a Clay Unicorn

This is a step by step tutorial by IndigoOcean to create a realistic unicorn (or a horse if you prefer).  Tutorial is in PDF format and includes lots of photos.   The artist takes you all the way from concept drawing, to creating an armature, sculpting the horse/unicorn, creating a mold and casting the sculpture.  You can skip the mold creation/casting process if you prefer, it's not a necessary part of this tutorial.  Just create your own one-of-a-kind sculpture instead!

Because the artist plans on creating a mold, he is using Plasteline clay, which is an oil-based clay which does not harden.   The Plasteline figure will be discarded after casting.   The author says:  "I'm not narrowing down the materials too much. The actual sculpting medium you use is entirely up to you, and this tutorial will focus on my process more than anything. I sculpt using many materials- polymer clay, air-dry stoneware clay, wax, plasteline, paper clay, and epoxy putty- but for all of them the techniques used vary little. This tutorial centers around designing, sculpting, molding, casting and finishing a piece."

Spoon Doll ~ Fantasy Figure

Hildi, a 22" spoon doll by Studio Willich

Here's a great tutorial from Studio Willich showing how they make spoon dolls (updated).   Spoon dolls are simply sculptures that start out with a wooden spoon as armature, as shown below.   I don't often feature polymer clay tutorials that have to be converted to use air-dry clay, but

Making a Sleeping Elf

This is a step-by-step tutorial to create a sleeping elf, gnome or Leprechaun using cold porcelain.  (Hmmm...possibly another cousin to our mascot gnome!  LOL)   Instructions are in Spanish but there's many photos showing each step.    Google can translate the page for you or you can just follow the photo examples.

Create a Leprechaun or Elf

This is a step-by-step tutorial to create an elf (or Leprechaun) using cold porcelain.  (He bears a strong resemblance to our mascot gnome...maybe they're cousins!  LOL)   Instructions are in Spanish but there's many photos showing each step.    Google can translate the page for you or you can just follow the photo examples.

Materials needed are:

• Cold porcelain (CP) paste (or other air-dry clay)
• White tempura is used to tint white CP, acrylics may be used
• Oil paints are also used to pre-tint the CP, acrylics may be used instead, if desired.  You can also choose to paint the figure after curing, but pre-tinting usually works best.   Suggested colors are brown (umber), green (leggings), blue (vest), a skintone, and fuscia for shirt.  Of course, if you're making a Leprechaun, you might want to use some other colors.
• 2 Styrofoam spheres (#4) for head and body
• White glue
• paint brushes and clay modeling tools
• a wood base
• hand wipes to keep hands clean

Fairy Art Doll Tutorial

K.Michelle from K.Michelle Creations shares a clever tutorial for making this easy fairy art doll using papier mache & paperclay.   Other materials used include a Styrofoam ball and a foam cone plus wood dowels, a wood base, wire, paint, embellishments of your choice and typical tools such as glue and wire cutters.

Make these cute elves for Christmas or anytime

Make one elf or 100 elves as Christmas favors! This clay tutorial for creating these expressive elves has been translated to English based on step-by-step instructions written by Sandra Gomez and

How to Sculpt a Fairy Head the Hannie Sarris Way

Great photo tutorial from the late* Hannie Sarris showing us, step by step, how to sculpt a fairy head.   Hannie used LaDoll for this tutorial but says this sculpting technique is suitable for other air dry clays.
http://www.hanniesarris.nl/page.php?page=sculpting_fairy_head&lang=en

Hannie says the basis for the head is a special type of Styrofoam, also used for coffee cups (but, I suppose if regular Styrofoam is all you can get, it'll work also).   She inserts a small dowel or stick completely thru the foam and coming out the top of the head.  This just makes things easier to handle while sculpting.  The hole in the head can always be patched later or covered with hair.

Example of completed fairy below:

Psyche by Hannie Sarris

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*Hannie Sarris passed away suddenly and too soon due to complications from pneumonia on May 2, 2010  

How to Add Faux Stitches to Clay Figure

The following video demo from a guy in Sweden called Guldies shows us how to add whimsical stitches to a sculpt.  Detailed, dimensional and authentic looking.  The sculpture he creates in this video is quite wild, whimsical and colorful!

Make Our Mascot Gnome!

This cute gnome tutorial was created by Leticia Suarez del Cerro for a Spanish-language website.  Because of their Javascript-style slideshow, computer-assisted translation is difficult, so I've translated it to English for you as best as I can.

Cute Little Dragon

Step-by-step cold porcelain tutorial to create this little dragon.  Tutorial is written in Spanish but there's plenty of photos, so you should be able to follow along even if you cannot read the text.   Sorry, computer translation won't work because tutorial was uploaded as an image.