Sculpting Cloudburst

The process of making one of my latest two small raptor figures, this one being a poseable art doll, with fabric body, and clay head, hands, and feet.

I actually considered that approach when Skye's second figure was at planning stage, before deciding otherwise. Skye's mom was my first customized existing figure, and Skye was my first figure sculpted from scratch, so I suppose it's fitting Skye's child is my first art doll. :)

I worked on Cloudburst for a little over two weeks from late October to mid November 2022, at the same time as I worked on Tempest, who took longer mostly because I took a break for a while from sculpting her to focus on this figure.

I started by putting together a wire armature. The spine is a long piece of two 0.3mm jewelry wires twisted together. One of the two is twice the length, looping at the tail tip, so it's really three wires. The limbs are 0.8mm steel wire, with the arm and leg on each side being the same piece. There's also a steel wire for the other weight-bearing toe of each foot.

This armature is version 2. The first version I made had all the main parts in steel wire, but it was too stiff to allow posing such a tiny doll, so I switched the spine and the lower arms to the more bendable jewelry wire. The arms ended up not being very poseable, but less steel on them did make them a bit lighter, and the figure less front-heavy.

Put together, with some parts added. The three main parts are wrapped together at the whole length of the back with more jewelry wire, wrapping around the limbs a few times, too, to keep them in place, and the toes are also attached by wrapping jewelry wire around the metatarsals. I made hand armatures by twisting together three jewelry wire pieces, and they'll be attached later after I sculpt the hands.

The neck has shrunk to a more reasonable length. I made a loop out of 1mm aluminum wire (aluminum being a more lightweight material, though for the wire skeleton it's too fragile), which will go inside the head. I twisted the loop wire's ends to keep it in place once it's been attached, and I'd left the neck's wires so long so I can attach the aluminum piece by wrapping them into the loop. After that I still wrapped a fourth jewelry wire around the neck.

Then to sculpting the clay parts. I started with the hands, first making claws onto the ends of the wires with brown polymer clay. The wire goes pretty far inside the claw, so they are supported, too. After baking those, I added a sheet of grey clay on one and light brown clay on the other side of the palm, cut slits between the fingers, and carefully smoothed the clay around the wires. I added a snake of clay around the base of each claw to make the edge neat, with a bit of liquid clay between the baked and raw clay. There's also a small piece of foil filling inside the palm.

You can find more information about my sculpting tools and about using polymer clay in general in the post about sculpting Cloudburst's sister Tempest.

Then feet. I made them mostly the same way as Tempest's. I baked flat pieces for the bottoms of the feet first. Then I attached a wire inside the claw of each third toe (the non-sickle-claw middle toe), this time leaving it longer, and wrapping it around the toe wire after baking the claws. The wire is also bent into a corkscrew a bit inside the claw to keep it from sliding out.

Then I built the third and fourth toes onto the sole pieces and around the wires. I used clay I'd designated as filler clay (the light grey I use as my default sculpting colour, and pieces I'd shaved off when sculpting the hands and couldn't reuse somewhere visible because the colours were blended in them) to bulk up the shape, before wrapping over that a thin sheet of the darker grey I'd mixed for this figure. Putting on a skin, I suppose. I wanted the feet to be solid clay to give them more weight, but didn't want to waste the clay I'd carefully mixed, or let the clays that had gotten accidentally mixed go to waste.

I baked both feet when the weight-bearing toes were sculpted (there's a small bit of wire visible in one in the photo, I patched that up later but it was harder to spot while the clay was raw and shiny). Then I added the remaining toes (also the same way I'd made Tempest's sickle claw and dewclaw toes) and the scutes. Because of how chonky the toes had already gotten, I sculpted the scutes near the claws with the "skin" layer rather than adding more clay on top.

Then the head. First I took some measurements and made myself some reference blueprint things. The wire loop attached to the neck will go pretty far inside the head, so I needed to leave room for it. To achieve this, I picked a brush handle about the same size as the wire tangle, and sculpted the head on that (though I baked it without it). I want the head to be light, so I filled as much as I could with foil.

I sculpted the head in four bakes, starting from the jaw and mouth. This is after two bakes, with raw clay about to be shaped into a snout, and lighter grey clay to go behind the eyes. I tried to attach a bit of foil between the eyes that I could bend into an armature/filler for the brows, but it didn't work out. It would likely have made the brows too thick anyway.

The light brown clay I used as the underbelly colour is really sticky compared to the other clays for some reason, and I had trouble getting it to behave without it clinging to tools and getting details smushed, though so far I'd made it work (I used it on Tempest, too). To help with that, I left my lump of that clay on a piece of printer paper while I took a lunch break, and the paper leeched some of the oils out of it, making it more manageable.

After the next bake, I had this. The eyes are glow-in-the-dark clay - two halves of one of the clay balls I baked when making Tempest (the one that was too big for her). There's a bit of pink clay at the inner corners of the eyes, though it's barely visible. And one upper eyelid is blue to help with eventually adding the familiar blue stripe markings Cloudburst has inherited from her mother and grandmother.

After baking all of that, I added brow arches, and some other final touches, including a rim for gluing the body's fur fabric to. Then baked it for a full hour to be sure all the clay is cured.

I attached the hands to the main armature by wrapping jewelry wire around both the wire coming out of the hand and the wire of the upper arm, and around the back a few times. Each hand piece's wires end in a loop, since like the spine, it's three pieces of wire twisted together, with two being one piece folded in half. The connecting wire goes through the loop, ensuring the hands don't fall off even if I couldn't wrap the wire very tightly.

Though the figure is small, it's big enough compared to the other raptor figures I have that Cloudburst is already old enough here that her tail has a few pin feathers starting to grow for the juvenile plumage. For four of them I made feather shafts out of plastic tag ties I hadn't thrown out. I attached the ties to a length of jewelry wire by wrapping it around the T-shaped ends.

The middle of the wire goes through the loop at the end of the tail, and the ends twist around the base of the tail and then the back. This was a bit of an experiment and I wasn't sure how it would go, but I think it turned out pretty well in the end.

I used hot glue to attach the head to the neck, and to cover some of the wires, especially in places where there are sharp ends and places I'm likely going to grab while posing the figure. The legs are set in one pose, so I put the glue on them, too, as a bit more reinforcement, not that the steel wire needs it. To balance the figure after the head and hands made it front-heavy, I also added more wire to the tail first to act as counterweight.

I painted the hands and feet at this point, though they didn't need much colour added, just some stripes and dots in a dark purple-grey that I also put a bit of on the face since I had it mixed.

Then, time to deal with the faux fur. I had made patterns for the pieces and tested and adjusted them a few times with scrap fabric, but that fabric wasn't fur, and my plans changed quite a bit through working with the actual materials. I cut the pieces according to my patterns, remembering to cut fur slowly and on the "wrong" side, only cutting the fabric part and not the fluff.

Then I sewed the side and underbelly pieces together at the tail and neck, right sides together, leaving the middle of the seam open to fit the limbs through there, and turned it over to fit it on the wire skeleton and do the rest of the sewing on that.

The underbelly fur is from a keychain, by the way, that had a fluffy ball in leopard print faux fur on it. The piece I needed was small enough that I cut it from the light base colour between spots, since that was the best colour match fur I had found. I didn't throw out the rest, could very well end up having a use for it in a future project (and for the stuffing from it that I also ended up not using).

After finishing sewing the body, the poor birb was drowning in fluff. I'd had separate pieces for the legs, and arms included in the side pieces, but I left both of those out in the end and just sewed the seam between the side and underbelly shut with the limb wires poking out from between. I'd also planned to include the head in the side piece, but I instead cut that part off, too, and gathered the fur at the neck. I did know fur adds volume to a plushie doll that would look smaller when made of a non-fur fabric, but, well, this is a very small doll, and though the fur is pretty short, it's long compared to a small doll, so I reduced bulk where I could (including by not using stuffing, it's just the wires under the fur).

After a lot of trimming of the fur, and a few stitches here and there, the figure had more shape to it. I also trimmed the fabric tufts representing the pin feathers, and they're barely visible like they would be on a growing bird, except for one longer feather I left on the tail. The ones with a tag tie shaft are attached by gluing a piece of fabric on each side of the tie, the others are sewn on. The fabric I used on them is the shiny kind that's used to line coats and jackets.

I added fluff to the limbs next. To the legs I glued loose fluff cut from the fur fabric (the coating of hot glue giving the legs more surface area and making them less slippery than bare metal would be ended up being helpful there). The forearms each got a small rectangle of the fur fabric glued around them, and then loose fluff here and there. Before attaching the rectangles, I trimmed the fur on them shorter and sewed a couple of pin feather tufts to one. The loose fur I trimmed on the figure after the glue on it had dried, as it was easier to apply in long clumps that are more likely to have all the hairs in them pointing in roughly the same direction.

I cut pieces for the head; two grey sides, and underbelly colour in the middle. I sewed right-sides-together the underbelly to the grey pieces, and the middle of the seam between the grey pieces at the back of the neck, and after turning slipped the resulting fluff collar over the figure's head.

I glued it to the head using fabric glue, though PVA craft glue has worked for the other fluff-attaching. I left the glue to dry properly overnight.

Well, I was still going to do more that evening before that, but lest I start sounding like I knew what I was doing while making this, I also managed to almost drop the figure into a sink full of water (trying to wash off some glue I got on one hand, while holding the figure with the other hand to press the seam, instead of waiting to wash the glue off later), so at that point I decided it's time to get some sleep. (And let the figure dry its tail, too, which got wet when I grabbed it to keep it from falling and getting a lot wetter.)

The next day I sewed shut the rest of the seam at the back of the neck, attached the grey parts to the body, and gave the fur on the neck, too, a good trim. The underbelly part of the head piece seemed fine without sewing it to the body, so I applied fabric glue along the edge to keep it from fraying, holding it away from the body while the glue dried so that doesn't attach it, either, and left that seam open, covered by the fur fibers.

I'd kind of hoped to keep that dark patch at the throat, but the dark colour was at the tips of the fur and got cut off in the trim. Perhaps it'll factor into Cloudburst's future appearance as she grows, though...

Then I painted the face before the final stretch of fluff mayhem. The irises got a thin coat of yellow to let light through, with an unpainted rim around the pupil for a bit brighter glow (a technique I've used before when making new eyes for Beetlebiter and Singer's figures). The blue markings have some metallic blue paint in them in addition to regular blue acrylics.

Adding fluff to the face, working from the back of the head towards the snout. After I was done with that, I added the last bit of paint to the face, that being the white shine dots on the eyes. I used a round-tipped darning needle for that to get an evenly-shaped dot, and put it on the pupil entirely so it doesn't interfere with the irises glowing.

And with that, Cloudburst is done!

She admittedly turned out a bit bigger than intended compared to her sister, though she is supposed to be the bigger one of the two anyway. We'll say she's just hit a growth spurt in preparation for that new plumage the pin feathers are for, and being actually different lab versions of JP/W Velociraptor, the two of them can certainly have some differences in their growth curves.