BREAKAGE PREVENTION
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Other than having good quality polymer clay and learning how to bake your clay properly which are the main contribution to having stable and strong baked sculptures, there IS one more way you can strengthen it!
HEADPINS TO DA RESCUE
There are a lot of headpins out there, and they're commonly used for making loops for accessories. You can use metal wires instead, which are usually much more flexible. But I had a lot of these headpins, and it's a lot easier to handle since I make miniatures! If you need to make bigger sculptures, metal wires might be a better choice for you. (For example, if you want to build a human figurine on metal wires)
Think of these wires as a "skeleton" for your clay creation. Especially if you're attaching raw clay, it's definitely much better to have a wire in the middle between the two clay to make sure it doesn't accidentally get "bent" so easily! (example down below in a moment)
The ones I have are 4.5cm and 2.5cm respectively. I rarely use the longer one, but it's good to have when I do need it - you never know aye!
Both headpins and metal wires does have different colours (usually gold, silver, and copper), but since it's going to be in the clay..I find that it usually doesn't matter haha.
Headpins usually have a little stub at the end which you won't need most of the time, so you can simply cut it off using a wire cutter.
It's good to have the stub sometimes when you do need the extra support though, but you can only poke it through one side so it really depends on what you make! 😊
Get the right tools to help you bend the wire into shape! Here's a flat nose plier at work. It's useful if you need it to be at a certain angle, with a straight edge!
If you need it to be rounded, it's better if you have a rounded nose plier instead. This is usually useful for making it into a keychain loop (which I will write about soon!)
I usually use it with raw clay, so let's say you've done most of the shaping and want to attach another clay which is longer (longer pieces is easier to "snap"!), use a (sharpest and preferably thin) needle tool you have and poke a hole! This will help your raw clay to stay in shape and doesn't get distorted as easily. A blunt metal wire will definitely make it harder to go through just by itself!
If the clay you're going to be attaching has a big surface area, you can use liquid clay to strengthen the bonding too! I usually will put clay ON the metal piece putting it inside too (forgot to do so in this GIF haha)
Blending both clays well helps a ton to keep the bonding stronger too! Here I'm using my curved probe tool.
Here's just an example of how easy it is to break an attachment without any wire "skeleton" inside after baking!
It did take a slight while in the beginning, because the clay was well baked, and the liquid clay helped a ton. But you can see how once the clay is snapped, the two piece just got detached very easily!
Compared to this one which has a metal "skeleton", I basically had to "bent the wire inside" to try to pry the clay piece out (and I did it with quite a bit of force too, since I actually lost grip and the pieces flew away HAHA 🤣)
If you need to attach another clay piece AFTER you've baked the first one, you can always use a drill bit to drill a hole and then placing the metal headpin through! The drill bit that works for me for this situation is 0.8mm! Super convenient I tell ya 😍
For baked clay to metal, I recommend using super glue to attach - it's just much stronger imo. This is more for after you're done with sculpting everything and just need to attach! If you need to attach baked clay to headpin to raw clay, I recommend liquid clay instead of super glue since the headpin will be hidden anyway!
The super glue I use is a no-run-gel type. I ran out of the liquid type, which might be better for this case (I had to clean off the excess glue, and that might leave white stains!)
Just to show you guys how secure super glue with baked clay is!😊
Here's an example of how I use the metal headpin to make a "skeleton" for this penrest! I had to make sure it's as sturdy as it can be, since it has to support something else, AND it has a thin connection from the "spilled ink" and the "bottle"!
As you can see, I made sure to use my needle tool to poke a hole here first too before putting the headpin through! It just make things easier even though it was okay for this clay to be distorted haha.
You can see that I didn't even cut off the stub at the end of the headpin, as I thought it will create a better blockage and prevent it from breaking - since I intend to pour some resin inside which will cover the stub!
I used super glue here too! 😉
Here's the full video of how I make this penrest if you're interested!
Another example would be this doggo I sculpted!
Right in the beginning, you can see how I attached a metal headpin to connect the body to the head! It was probably unnecessary since I added so many clay afterwards and it's not as thin (which means it'd be more prone to snapping) - but it's better to be safe than sorry!
I wanted to show this because I once did a couple of animals before, and their head snapped (I know, kinda gory haha) because of a combination of bad baking and bad blending of the two clays! You can read it here. I still thought it was the shipping, but it was definitely the lack of experience hahaha. That was really long ago and I'm glad I'm definitely more confident of the way I built these clay together to lesson the chance of it breaking 😊I've come a long way!
These may seem like very simple tips but it did help me a lot, so I hope it will help you solve any problem you've had too! 😀
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