In today’s post I am sharing with you how I made my sheep sculptures.
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Wales is well known for its castles and of course its sheep, so it was only a question of time that I eventually decided to make sheep sculptures. However the idea came to me via a post I shared on my Facebook page – it showed lots of adorable Valais Blacknose Sheep – possibly the cutest sheep on the planet. That post proved to be hugely popular and was liked by people who don’t even like my page (their loss). When I asked my likers if I should try my hand at making sheep they said yes I should. So I did.
And I have to say – they were surprisingly tricky and time consuming to make.
My first attempt didn’t work out. I made the main body first, by assembling the torso, legs, hooves and attached the head with a cocktail stick. At my first attempt I tried adding the “wool” by extruding white clay and just adding it onto the body in a random fashion. It looked not only unsightly – the extra weight of the clay was pushing onto the little legs – which of course effects the overall look and the way it stands.
Back to the drawing – or rather- claying board (I don’t really make sketches for my sculptures). I decided it was a better idea to assemble the sheep and bake it first before adding any wool.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Valais Blacknose sheep have shaggy wool, so I decided to stick with the extruder method and this also gave me the first occasion to use my brand new (only a 1 year old!!) Lucy Clay extruder. It took me a while to figure out how the tool works, because the instructions it came with are very poor. Anyway, after extruding lots of thin long sausages I cut them short and painstakingly attached the resulting strands onto the sheep using liquid polymer clay as glue. As you can see almost all sheep have 5 layers – so you can imagine how time consuming this was.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
When I showed my first finished sheep people’s reaction was overwhelmingly positive. So I made some more – two of them have horns. I always thought sheep with horns are male, but apparently that’s not necessarily the case. Horns just mean they are older sheep.
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To make sure my sheep stand well I have put them on some “grass”.
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I also tried my hand at ordinary sheep as I still had a few heads left. So two of my sheep are black and white with white wool made out of tiny balls of clay (also quite time consuming, but slightly less complicated than the other method).
Every herd has at least one black sheep – and so has mine.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I hope you like my sheep. You can buy them all now on my website.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to share and comment below. Image may be NSFW.
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The post The making of my sheep sculptures appeared first on Helenka White Design.
