Campi Peaches

 

I hesitate to use the word “tutorial” for my “how-I-did-it” blog posts, since I am certainly not an expert, and only guessing and bumbling as I go!

That being said, here is how I ended up doing my peaches for the Campi scene…..

I mixed up a batch of yellowish clay.  I ought to have photographed, or at least written down my recipe.  From what I remember, it was about:

• 1/2 translucent
• 1/2 ecru
• smidge of bright yellow

I rolled the clay into a log and sliced up into (fairly) regular pieces.  Then I rolled each log chunk into a ball.

The next few steps were a trial-and error process.  What I ended up doing was using a small ball-pointed tool to make the ‘stem divot’ (is there a name for that thing?)

Then, I rolled the ball of clay down the tool, starting the line down the middle of the peach.

The ball point tool was a bit too thick to create the entire line, so I used a needle tool to continue the line to the antipodes of the peach. 

And this picture isn’t part of the tutorial, I’m just proud of the way my little peaches look!

I used a mix of bright and dull red, and a peachy-pink for shading.  One thing I need to learn is how the baked product differs from the raw clay! 

Here are my pretty, blushy peaches, pre-baking, looking juicy and ready to bite into!

And here are the baked peaches.  While still quite pretty, are not what I was going for.  I liked the shading on the raw clay better.  The colors are more muted, and there isn’t quite the stark shading differences I was going for.  But, it’s all a learning experience, and all in all, I’m still quite happy with them, even if they turned out much more orange-tinged than I was aiming for.

I was going to do a couple of close up shots (or as close as I can get with my camera……it absolutely refuses to focus on things properly!), but I left my whole tub of miniatures over at my sisters’ house!  Ah well, next time!