More Miniatures

My sister was bemoaning the lack of magnets on her refrigerator recently.  I decided to leverage my new-found love of miniatures to make some cute (and functional) magnets.

The first completed magnet is The Cake from Portal:

My version isn’t quite the same (missing one whipped cream/cherry, whipped cream is bigger on mine, and I want to find a better solution for the candle in the future), but I’m pretty pleased with the final result!

		Portal Cake Magnet VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Just to prove it’s really a magnet, here it is sticking to my pasta machine:

I didn’t take pictures of the process, but basically what I did was use some crummy old clay for the base of the cake.  The ‘frosting’ is brown clay thinned with TLS, with black ‘craft sand’ mixed in for texture.  (This part took the longest to ponder over, but finally decided on the craft sand.  I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but it turned out quite nicely!)  The cherries are teeny red balls shaped with a pin and ball tool.  The whipped cream is plain white clay that I pressed into Floree mold and lightly pressed into the wet ‘frosting’.

Before I baked the cake, I assembled all the pieces, and poked a hole for the ‘candle’ (which is actually a toothpick painted white).  Oh, btw, I used a cork with a piece of wire on it to anchor the cake while I worked with it…my fingers were getting so messy, I took a que from cake decorating

After the cake baked and cooled, I dabbed glue on the bottom of the painted toothpick and jammed it into the hold in the center.

I ought to have made a hole at the bottom for the magnet to rest in, but after some quality time with a razor blade, I had a little round cavity for the magnet to rest in. 

I cut a circle out of matting board, and used a leather punch to make the divots around the edge (next time, I’ll measure them out, instead of ‘eyeballing’ it!), and painted the board a light tan color.

After the board dried, I just glued it all together with a strong white glue (hopefully is strong enough!), and I’m letting it sit before it goes to live on the fridge!

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!