Sculpting Tempest

A post compilation of the process of making a tiny raptor figure child for my two previously-tiny raptor figures. I'll post photos of the finished figure set soon to my site and deviantart (ETA: now posted to site, DA, and also tumblr).

Tempest is sculpted with polymer clay, which can be baked in a home oven, and comes in various colours (and can be mixed into more colours). I worked on her for about a month, from October to November 2022.

As with her mother's second figure, I started with the mouth. I originally thought of making this figure even tinier than it ended up being, but when I decided to have her mouth be open, well, this is probably the tiniest I'm currently able to make these pieces.

Nevertheless, I sculpted two mouth pieces with upper and lower teeth, using pink and off-white polymer clay. Each mouth piece was a single bake without baking the teeth separately first like I did with juvie Skye. Maybe this way works better. When they were both baked, I connected to the backs of them a strip of aluminum foil with a bit of raw clay, and liquid polymer clay as glue between the raw and baked clay. Baked again...

And we have a poseable mouth.

With the foil helping keep the mouth pieces in place, I added more clay around them to set them into position, with dark red clay at the back of the mouth. Then baked again. Polymer clay can be baked and rebaked as many times as you want, so I thought it's best to save my progress often with something this tiny and easily squishable.

Then some lighter pink to the sides of the corners of the mouth, and a tongue.

I attached a wire to the back of the head to have more to hold it by, and to attach it to the body later. She'll stop looking like a xenomorph soon, I promise.

Let's put some skin on those bare bones. Light brown clay to form the lips, snout, and chin. After baking those, I still tweaked the lower jaw's shape and the mouth corners, but I was running out of places to hold this thing by even with the wire, and focusing on details is easier when the spot you're working on is the only part to worry about ruining.

And then eyes! A little mid-sculpting photo, because she just looked so silly like this and I must share.

I rolled glow-in-the-dark polymer clay into a ball and baked it, then cut it in half (well, there were more than one, just in case, and good call - one was too big, one split unevenly when I cut it, but one was just right). I added liquid clay and some filler grey clay to the indents I'd left for the eyes, and with a drop more of liquid clay, I put the hemispheres on that.

Before baking, I made eyelids, for which I used brown clay to help with the painting stage, which is also why the clay I used for lips is light brown instead of the grey I mostly use. In these photos she also already has brows, which I added after I'd baked the head with the eyes attached.

For her body, I made a wire armature with a bit of foil for filler. I had planned on making a base for her at first, and the leg wires were going to be sunken into the base, but I later changed my mind and trimmed the wires. I used one piece of 1mm aluminum wire for the spine and another for the legs, with the two tied together with 0.3mm jewelry wire (which is also what I attached to her head).

I started adding clay onto the body. Here are the results of three separate bakes. First I covered the foil, and after baking that I put a piece of jewelry wire through the sides of the chest for the forelimbs. They were a bit trickier to sculpt onto the wires than I'd expected, so I only got this far on one forelimb at first, but I saved my progress again by baking. The third bake is after adding a bit more foil filler around the tail wire, and then covering that with clay.

At this point I combined her into one piece. I twisted the wire attached to the head around the neck wire, which I cut shorter first. The head is mostly solid clay, and heavier than the tail, but she can stand on her own already, which is encouraging, though I'll need to put care in sculpting the feet so they'll keep her from falling on her face.

Covering the wire tangle with clay and baking that to make the neck a bit sturdier before I do anything else to it.

Then bulking up the neck and giving it its actual shape and texture. Ready to go in the oven in the same bowl I used for baking Skye back in the day. :')

I added clay here and there at this point to refine shapes and add detail where it looked like that was needed. The face got a bit wider and the top of the head more detailed, and I closed the brow ridges more at the back. I also made the body a bit rounder and less lumpy, and the tail thicker.

Then onto the legs, starting from the ground up. To give the feet flat soles and to put already baked clay under the wires so they don't sink through the soft clay of the feet before I've baked them, I made thin raptor foot sole pieces from clay I'd mixed to be the shade of brown I use for baby JP raptors' base colour, and baked them, and also with them some small, dark brown claws. Again giving future me an easier time with the painting of small parts in potentially hard to reach places.

I gave each foot's other weightbearing toe an armature wire as well. I used steel wire, as it's stronger, and also heavier than the aluminum wire, and attached them by baking a bit of clay around the metal metatarsals. I worked on one foot at a time, and next used more brown clay to sculpt the toes around the wires, with the figure placed on top of the sole pieces. I attached the already baked claws by putting a bit of liquid clay on them and sticking them into the unbaked toes. Then baked again.

The claw of the middle toe of each foot also has a bit of jewelry wire inside it as armature, as the toeclaws will be the first things to catch the figure if it tips forward and keep it from falling, so maybe they could use a bit of extra strength. For even more strength I could have made the jewelry wire inside the claw longer and wrapped it around the toe wire before adding clay to the feet, but I didn't think of that until afterwards, so this technique got used only later, when I sculpted Tempest's sister Cloudburst.

After both feet's weightbearing toes were baked, I reinforced the legs with jewelry wire wrapped around the aluminum wire. Should make them sturdier, and also help clay stick to the legs.

And like with the neck, before doing any proper sculpting of shapes, I wrapped clay between and around the wires to cover them and set them in place. Raw clay will stick better to clay than to metal, and this means less worrying about that when putting muscle on those twig legs.

Which I did next. The left leg got a bit of foil filling, as the leg is held away from the body a little and needed more material, and also to lengthen the shin part I'd made too short.

Next I made the remaining toes. I baked the sickle claws first separately, with an armature of foil inside them. I considered using the jewelry wire, which would be stronger, but foil is both lighter and more malleable, so it felt like a better choice. Clay also sticks to its crinkly texture better.

After the sickle claws were baked, I sculpted the toes around them with the same brown clay as the rest of the feet, leaving some foil uncovered for sticking into raw clay that I put around the metatarsals. I baked the sickle claw toes again separately after I had the toe sculped, before attaching them.

Then I spent a couple of hours not only adding the toes, but tweaking tiny details and adding clay all over the figure where it looked like more shaping was still needed after all, pretty much leaving just the tail to hold the figure by so I don't squish all of that while doing the toe attaching. Not very well planned, but it worked out.

The foil held the sickle claw toes off the ground really well, even when I inevitably bumped tools into them when doing things like sculpting the scutes, so that proved a good decision. The dewclaw toe is a small snake of brown clay, with a tiny bean of dark brown clay attached to it.

I finished one foot first before baking the figure again, and also added the hand on the same side before that. I'd baked the hands separately, too, and they just needed to be attached to the arm. The hands are so tiny they're just a lump of clay with two slits cut between fingers and smoothed and shaped as best I could. One is again made with already brown clay, with just claws needing painting later (I ran out of the brown clay I'd mixed, so one hand is grey).

And with one more foot and one more hand baked, and all limbs sculpted, after one more trip to the oven (or, I like to think of it as a big incubator in this case), sculpting phase done!

Getting painted with (kid version of) mom as reference. :)

 The tools I used for sculpting Tempest are:

• Silicon "brush" tool. The only actual sculpting tool in the bunch, and the most expensive one, but I've also found it really useful, so it was worth buying.
• Sewing pin. My favorite, most versatile sculpting tool ever, no joke.
  
• Loop of 1mm aluminum wire. Didn't use it much, as the sculpture is so smol, but it was good as a bendable substitute for the above two in some awkward places, for smoothing the clay.
• Small craft blade. For cutting and carving, and also scraping thin clay pieces off the work surface (which in my case is the glass of an empty photo frame, but I also sculpt thin, fragile pieces directly on the piece of baking paper they'll be baked on).
  
• Paperclip with its plastic coating cut and pulled off one end a little. Circular scale stamp.
• Darning needle. Good for dino nostrils.

Some advice I've gotten from artists more experienced at using polymer clay is to bake for 30 minutes per each 1/4 of an inch the clay piece is thick. Bakes while the sculpture is still unfinished can be shorter, to just quickly attach things, so long as the final bake is as long as is needed for all of the clay in it to bake. Tempest is a little under half an inch wide at the hips, so the final bake was one hour.

I baked her in a ceramic bowl and a few times on a ceramic dinner plate that are labeled as oven-safe (whether they're safe to eat from again after a wash, I don't know, but I keep these just for sculpture baking now). A foil baking pan works, too, and as seen in the earlier photo, I've used lumps of aluminum foil to hold her up. Just pay attention to what surface the raw clay is touching, as it will take on the texture of that surface - foil and glazed ceramic will result in smooth, shiny surface, which I didn't want while making a dinosaur, so there's always a piece of baking paper under her somewhere. (The pieces are actually trimmings from baking sheets I bought for cooking that turned out to be too big for my oven. I've been collecting them to use in sculpting later while using up that batch.)

To protect her from direct exposure to the heat source at the ceiling of the oven, I had a foil "tent" of some kind over her each time I baked her. An upturned foil baking pan worked fine, although she's so tiny that a few times I also just scrunched up a piece of foil to fit over a smaller clay part.

To make sure clay pieces are baked in the correct temperature, I have an oven thermometer. A cheap one, it doesn't need to do much, but it's an important help in baking polymer clay. Home ovens aren't very precise about telling the actual temperature, but the clay is precise about what temperature it needs for properly curing. Exact temperature can vary depending on your brand of clay. I used Fimo Soft, which says 110°C on the package, but can handle up to 130°C though not above that. My clay pieces are mostly baked at temperatures between 110°C and 120°C.

Polymer clay is plastic, and unbaked clay touching some other plastics can cause a reaction that isn't good for either material. Plastics labeled with recycling numbers 1, 2, 4, and 5 are safe to store polymer clay in, numbers 3 and 6 are not (7 is "other plastics" and doesn't on its own indicate whether it's compatible, but acrylic, and in my experience nylon, are safe). Unlike air-dry clay, polymer clay doesn't need to be stored in airtight containers, but to avoid getting dust in it, I do anyway. It can get drier and crumblier with time in storage, but adding a bit of liquid clay to it makes it workable again.

Alright, I hope that's helpful. More birbs soon. :)