Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Making Doll Food Polymer Clay 101 pt 9




This week as we continue our discussion of working with polymer clay to make our doll foods I wanted to go a bit more in-depth on how to color your liquid polymer clay. I am working with the same 2 brands I showed you last week in our introduction to liquid clays.

The two easiest ways to color this product in my opinion is to use either chalk or tube oil paint.

For using chalk just scrape off a bit of the chalk from the stick just like if you were going to use it to color your clay. Then mix it into the liquid clay with something like a toothpick. This will give a slightly cloudy color and you can often see the granules of the chalk. This can be a good or bad thing depending on what you are making. For some applications it is just what you do want.

To use tube oil paint just start with the smallest amount you can and just use the amount it takes to color the product. You don't want too much, a little goes a very long way. The paint gives a richer more solid color and is the baked liquid clay retains more of its translucency.

I do want to take a moment to say I know there are a lot of tutorials out there where acrylic paint is used to color liquid polymer clay. This is something the manufacturers do not recommend. Acrylic paint is water based and it can cause big problems when you bake the clay. I have heard of instances where items exploded when those water vapors expanded in the oven. So please stay away from the acrylic paint. The oil paints I use are the cheapest ones from the craft store so the investment in them was less than $5.

The last thing I covered in this video was how to mix the liquid clay with a dry crumbly clay to revive it. As you saw it is really easy to do. This is also the same way you make frosting (or other spreadable food items) from polymer clay.

Lastly I hope the difference in the surface shine was apparent on the video. There is a world of difference in how these two brands look when baked. That is one of the reasons I keep both brands on hand.





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