I’m trying out a new material in the initial sculpting process. I previously used natural clay, then let it dry leather hard and made a mold of it. Now that I’m thinking of doing more complex designs I thought I should get a better material. So I ready on Jason Freeney‘s facebook page that he uses epoxy clay for his sculptures. So I went out and bought some, on amazon. I decided to resculpt the diver’s helmet because the original had dried out pretty badly and it was all broken up. If you don’t get it right the first time, natural clay is hard to add more material to later.

So my first impressions of the clay is that it’s a little soft. Like play dough soft. Which made it really hard to get details right and it had a lot of sag to it. It says up to 3 hour working time, but that is a weird timeline.  It’s really soft up until the last 30 minutes, then it gets hard fast. That could have been because I wasn’t exact with the mixing, but who knows at this point. I mixed a little too much up at once, So I tried to sculpt everything. I made a little skull inside with the extra, but at that scale it’s really hard to get the details in it.

After looking at more of Freeney’s ‘in progress’ pictures I realized that he does his in separate steps. Which results in smoother shapes, I think I might try again with another helmet, it would also help get the walls thinner and more consistent. The one thing I cant figure out is how he sculpts his walls so thin but they are hollow at the same time. Maybe he uses balloons? or bowls for support and then merges them into whole shapes later? But I cant figure out how he gets them so organic and consistent.

For a first time I’m not that upset that I couldn’t get it exactly right. It did dry SUPER hard overnight, so I can start sanding soon. I used about a third of the clay with this sculpt. If I was doing it in stages I think it would use a lot less.

PROS.

• doesn’t dry out (for 2.5 hours)
• can be smoothed with water.
• can be joined easily.
• self drying.
• sandable.

CONS.

• more expensive.
• soft and saggy.
• sticky at first.