"Sacrifice" Papercraft

I love doing Papercrafts, but between university and my dolls there is just not much time for these. Often I have ideas and sketch them out to just forget about them again. I had this one planned for some time and finally found the time to prepare my workspace, which means getting rid of my sewing and sculpting stuff. This piece is still available in my shop.

Cordelia the Unicorn

This is Cordelia. Cordelia is a child of summer, born in the days of the first warm sunbeams. Sometimes the summer heat is too much for her and she hides in the depths of the woods, spending her time swimming in hidden lakes and looking for the perfect caves and crevices to build her home. Her horn is pure crystal and gold, giving her the ability to cleanse and heal the bodies and spirits of critters and plants living in the woods.

I did some things different for Cordelia, and I learned a lot of things. I am still not good at making patterns, the arms and feet always turn out way too slim. It is the same mistake I make with every doll, but one day I will learn! Her face is not simply glued on, which was a real challenge. And I changed her face halfway through but I really like how the crystal horn and the leaf gold accents turned out in the end. I fell in love with this little one, her colours and the lace-y cape and the beautiful fabric I used for her.

Work in Progress Roundup

This week was filled with me trying to make a pattern for the unicorns body. I never learned how to do this and I am often having a hard time. It is much easier to think about something and sculpt it than sew it. But I will learn to do this perfectly over time. I learn with every mistake.

Work in Progress Roundup

This weeks roundup is rather sparse. There were some health issues and I did not get as much done as I wanted, but I finished this little lady bat (she already made an appearance on this blog) and started working on something a bit out of my comfort zone. It's going to be a unicorn but since I have a beautiful ornate fabric for its body I sculpted this filigree into its head and... it is different and I am not sure I know what I'm doing... or even like it... my last deer doll was kind of botched and I am a bit scared working on them now, but I have to get over myself. I love deer and I love drawing them. Time to learn doing deer dolls....

Black Unicorn

As promised, here is the process post of the black unicorn. The process for this one was basically the same as for the white unicorn, except that I added the hair at the beginning. That way I did not have to worry about a seam at the top of the head, but it made the whole process much more complicated because the curly hair was sticking to everything and started to look gray when I sanded the head down, because the dust clung to the fake hair.

I started with an aluminium foil, wire and sticky tape armature and glued the hair to the back of the head into a deep cut I made with a scalpel. I used a lot of glue and it was a messy affair.

This is with the first layer of clay added. I wrapped the hair in foil so it did not get stuck to the clay. The nostrils look really stubby and kind of awkward here, so I changed them the next day.

I looked up some pictures of draft horses and changed the nostrils that way. And I added a little beard which you can barely see in any picture because the head is always resting on the chin.

The base coat of the unicorn is black gesso. I like the idea of the big black unicorn head but it was hard to add any details like I did with the white unicorn, and taking pictures is kind of hard.

 

Here it is, all finished. It has a gilded horn as well, and yellow-ish eyes. And you can see the beard in this picture. There is nothing else to say, except that I really like handling the two heads, but I put them away for now because i want to use a mat varnish and I have not found one yet that won't turn yellow after some time.

White Unicorn

Like I promised, here is the process of the white unicorn in pictures. It was, like I mentioned many times before, just an experiment, even though I would not call the finished head an experiment. But I did not know how I wanted the finished thing to look like, which is why I changed some things pretty late (like the hair).

I started with an aluminium foil, wire and sticky tape armature. It looked good at first but it was not stiff enough, so when I added the clay I kind of ruined the armature because the Magic Sculpt hardened while I used it (Magic Sculpt is a two part epoxy clay, it hardens through mixing resin with hardener) and I had to use force to get a smooth surface.

First pic shows the rough surface, on the second one I smoothed it down a bit (mostly with my finger nails and water) and decided for a place for the eyes.

Added more clay to the upper side of the head (I had to sculpt the head in two parts, since it had to dry on one side first). This part was pretty much finished, until I decided to try to get some fur texture in it, since I worked with that on two of my three dolls and it would be important to know if the clay was still soft enough for that.

I added the the texture with a pottery needle. Some parts were still pretty soft, others were hardening pretty fast, which made the whole process a pain in the butt. It all worked out in the end, but it stressed me out because working on the texture was a timed event. I should not have been any slower.

The horn and ears were very useful for working on the lower side of the head. I was adding the fur texture starting at the seams to the upper side so they were not visible in the end.

This is the finished head. At first I thought this was it, but for some reason (I really can't remember the reason) I decided it needed some hair.

It took some time to find the right kind of hair, I tried different things, but in the end I used some silvery gray plastic extensions. The picture above shows a bit of the hair. It was not that easy to add the hair because Magic Sculpt is hard as a rock when it has completely hardened (which takes about 6 hours). In the end I just added the extensions which left a bit of a bump, but it is not very obvious. I used white gesso as a base coat for the acrylics I usually use to paint the faces.

Painting at night has its disadvantages, one of them is that colors sometimes turn out all wrong. The first paint job of the fleshy parts turned out very yellow-y, so I added some pink. And I gilded the horn at the tip because I love to use that gilding wax.

And this is how the head looks in the end. I am very happy with it. And the long hair and blue glass eyes gives it a magical look.

There is still the process post of the black unicorn incoming, which won't be that exciting because it was pretty much the same process. Only that I added the hair straight at the beginning. But more on that  in the post itself.

Black and White

This blog is kind of quiet, and I am really sorry for that. I am currently learning for my last exam, but in my spare time I was working on some experiments. I wanted to try how magic sculpt would work for my dolls faces. It is really different to what I am used to work with, but I like it. At the beginning I only planned to do one head, and it was only an experiment, but over the course of working on it I added some gray extensions and even gilded the horn. I really liked how it turned out and started a second one, this time in black (because somebody told me to make a black one). The second one was inspired by draft horses, so it is bulkier than the first one. Here they are...

If you read this and are interested in purchasing one of them (or both) they are still up for grabs. There will be more detailed posts about them and their process soon.