PRE-BAKING POLYMER CLAY (WITHOUT OVEN!)
This article by @handxmade is free for personal use ONLY, any reproduction is prohibited.
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Note: This article is meant for crafters who has been using polymer clay for awhile and understand how polymer clay works.
For beginners, I recommend reading the articles below first to have a basic understanding of the medium before reading the rest of this article:
All done? Great, let’s go~
What does pre-baking polymer clay mean?
Pre-baking basically means that you bake your clay long enough for it to be hard (especially on the surface), but not enough for the clay to be comfortably durable.
For example, in this Sculpey Premo Clay packaging, it says to bake at 130°C for 30 min for 6mm thickness. Pre-baking would just be you baking it at a lesser time, eg. 130°C for 10 min for 6mm thickness instead.
Wait a minute, why pre-bake when it’s going to make the clay piece brittle?
SPEED UP CRAFTINGGGGGGGGG!!~
Sometimes, you just need a small portion to be baked and not change shape while you build something else on top of it. Pre-baking is great for that!
In the video above, I pre-baked a lot of parts so I could speed up the crafting process. (Especially when I was making the figurine’s face!)
Of course, you’ll need to be careful handling pre-baked clay as it will be brittle, but the time you can save really adds up if you know how to use this to your advantage!
I use this method a lot - sculpting and shaping clay on top on another clay piece, usually a base.
Here’s the difference sculpting on a raw, unbaked clay (accidentally scraping off the clay below no matter how gentle I may be), and on a pre-baked clay (CLEAN!).
How can I pre-bake my clay?
In the past, I used to pre-bake my clay the way I mentioned above — pop the creation in the oven at the same temperature as how I would bake it, but put it in for 10 minutes instead of 30 minutes to an hour.
After completing the whole project or a big segmented part of it, I would pop the whole thing in the oven again and bake for over an hour to ensure that the polymer clay is fully baked. That’s the best part about polymer clay — you can bake it as many times as you want!
But….for someone as impatient as me, that 10 minutes is not just wasted (granted I usually would do something else while I wait), it also means that my focus and train of thought were being cut off.
I wanted to figure out a way to pre-bake my clay a lot faster and more efficiently, and so……..
……this heat gun was my answer!
This hot air/heat gun is usually used for plastic-shrinking crafts. I wasn’t sure why I had it….but….worked out for me HAHA.
Basically, I literally blow SUPER HOT air on the surface of the clay to harden the surface. That’s really it!
If you read my article about polymer clay, I explained that when the polymer clay is baked, it would turn to a very nice matte finish. That’s how I know my clay piece is pre-baked!
See if you can see the difference in the finish from the GIF above! 😀
How I use the heat gun to pre-bake polymer clay:
Put your polymer clay piece on something that can hold heat without hurting yourself (like a ceramic tile, or an acrylic block)
⚠️ DO NOT HOLD THE CLAY PIECE OR THE SURFACE THE CLAY IS ON WITH YOUR HAND WHILE USING THE HEAT GUN, YOU WILL BURN YOURSELF! ⚠️
Turn on the heat gun, and go really close (about 1-1.5cm distance away)
KEEP MOVING THE HEAT GUN! Do not stay at one spot for too long (I will explain later)
Watch the polymer clay turn from gloss to matte. Once the surface is all matte, it’s been pre-baked!
Difference between pre-baking in an oven vs using a heat gun:
Pre-baking in an oven makes the pre-baking more consistent, hence LESS BRITTLE.
Using a heat gun is a lot faster, but that means the pre-baking IS ONLY ON A SURFACE LEVEL.
It may look SUPER weird here, but this is essentially shows how the pre-baking literally only bakes the surface the heat gun passes!
Do NOT assume that the heat from the heat gun can permeate through the middle of the clay and bake the middle. Chances are you will burn the surface of the clay before even reaching the middle 😵
For more visualisation, here’s how pressing on the pre-baked clay with heat gun looks. You can see the bottom of the clay that the heat gun DID NOT PASS THROUGH is still soft and can still be manipulated.
The polymer clay can be bent and broken really easily as well. So it is A MUST to put the polymer clay through an oven to bake it completely and fully so your clay pieces will be more durable!
When using the heat gun to pre-bake your clay, DO NOT stay in a spot for too long! You will burn the clay, and causes these permanent “bubbles” that you won’t be able to fix even if you use acetone. Think of it as the plastic being melted so much that the clay got distorted.
Some other pre-baking tips for smaller items:
If you handle a lot of tiny clay pieces (eg. sprinkles for miniature doughnuts/cakes), you can try this method!
Find a thick craft paper box, cut a hole big enough for the heat gun to pass through
Put your clay pieces in (make sure there is space for the pieces to roll around)
Stuff the heat gun’s head in, turn on, shake the box while the heat gun is heating the pieces!
And here you can see how you can pre-bake small pieces to be workable without distorting the clay — NOT USING THE OVEN! 🥳✨
I hope this little piece of information can help you speed up your creation process with polymer clay! It definitely did for me kekekeke. 🥰