Playing with clay and moulds.

I wanted a change from making cards so I had a few days playing with clay. I recently bought a couple of new moulds from Crafty Individuals, and I wanted to try them out. Although these can be used with a range of media, I prefer working with air-drying clay. As soon as it is pressed into the mould, it can be carefully removed and set aside to dry which means I can use the mould again straight away and make a run of one type if I want to. I have a couple of hard plaster type moulds but I much prefer the soft silicone ones. They are flexible making it quite easy to remove the clay, and nothing sticks to them. I find the embellishments dry quite fast, only needing over night, and on sunny days out here, they are often dry in a couple of hours. But I usually turn them over and leave them for a while longer to ensure they really are dry. Here are a few I made yesterday. The colour is not very true in the picture. They have dried from a fairly deep grey to almost white. Some are a bit rough around the edges, especially the little rabbit, but this is easily smoothed off with a fine sanding block, or nail file.
Next comes the fun of decorating them. I like to give mine a quick base coat first, usually of an acrylic paint. Then it is a case of looking through my stash and seeing what works best. Here are some samples I made using a variety of techniques. They all have a base coat of light grey or beige acrylic paint.The first one was then painted over in black and when it was dry I used a glue pen on some of the high points and pressed on a sheet of rainbow foil. The result is rather fun. The other medallions were painted in one colour and then highlighted with Inka-gold in a contrsting colour. Inka gold is a thick, creamy paint which I wiped on with a piece of kitchen roll.
You can see which are my new moulds can't you? The pretty little hearts were all painted with Viva precious metal colours, a range of gorgeous rich colours. The gold one had some of the paint wiped off again while still wet, and on the next one I used a very fine brush and several colours to highlight the design. The little flower was simply coloured with permanent brush markers and then glazed with a thin layer of glossy accents. Glossy accents also gives a lovely sheeen to the African head. The mask is an effective piece that I usually paint in a shades of brown with a little black added to darken the eyes and mouth. This one was lightly touched with some bronze paint to finish it off. It turns out different every time I make it.

These are my favourites from my latest session. The medallion was painted in a dark grey with some of it wiped off again. It was then foiled as above in gold. This technique was recommended to me by Jean from Crafty Individuals, and it gives a very pleasing, aged look. The little humming bird is painted with Precious metals. The colours are even prettier than they look here, and the green on the wings fading into deep blue is very effective. And finally my little elephant. He is only about 1.5cm across, and I am very fond of him. This time I painted him black and when he was dry I sprayed him liberally with Memories mist - Bright gold. At first I thought this had not had much effect, but as it dried, the mica settled into all his creases and gave him a really good finish.

Tomorrow I will show you what else I have done using moulds.