the frustration of not knowing your materials

I am usually a very spontaneous person when it comes to my art projects. I have an idea and I need to create it... right now. The only thing that is allowed to come between me and my art progress is a trip to an art supplies store to get everything I need. Yes, reading up on materials and techniques would probably be an immense help, but it always seems like such a waste of time to me. And finding things out on my own and experimenting can be very rewarding. Sometimes my way of doing it works, which is awesome. And sometimes it does not work.

One of these examples is the Raffi custom I am currently working on. I saw it and I had this instant idea... it had to have some antlers, big ones. Just.. because. I had already worked with wire armatures before, but the one for the Raffi turned out very wobbly. It might be because I only had some golden jewelry wire but what did it matter, it would have to work!

This is a picture of the very beginning. You can see the golden wire and the antlers in the back of the pic. And yes, I cut myself and used a Hello Kitty bandaid. I regret nothing!

I still had some super light air dry clay at home, so I decided that, when the antlers had to be that big, they should be light, because else they would probably bend down to the floor, which would look stupid. It took a lot of fumbling with the clay and the wire, both did not seem to like the idea to start a relationship for my little deer project. When I was done, it looked like this.

It was not that bad. They looked nice, but even after drying it was still bendy and wobbly, which was not what I wanted. I let it dry completely and decided to add another layer of light air drying clay. The antlers ended up a bit thicker, but still nice. Nice to look at at least.

But then, today, I moved it from the table, very carefully, to another place because I needed to clean a bit and one of the antlers broke. It did not fall off because of the wire underneath the clay, but I could not keep it like that. While staring at it in despair and thinking of some easy way out, I saw another crack on the other side.

 I decided to follow the fastest and probably easiest solution at that point, use some Magic Sculpt. I don't have that much experience with it yet, but I initially did not want to use it for the antlers because it is really heavy. I used it for the head and the whole thing is in danger of falling over if it was not for the tail of the same material that kept it kind of balanced. 

The antlers got another layer of clay and look really thick now. It is currently drying, but I have no experience at this, and I have no idea if it is the remedy for my breaking antlers.

So.. what does this whole experiment tell me? I should start planning things out a bit. If I had used the right thing from the beginning, this would not have happened. The right wire, the right clay... On the other hand, these failures help me realizing just that. That there are things I should not use in this or that way. But it probably cost me more time finding it out this way than it would have if I was just looking for advise on the internet.

I can't wait for the clay to dry. There is not much more I can do now but wait...