hand made

Art, Misc-, Tutorials

DIY: Paper Clay

chezlin ·

fi2.jpg

When I made the post about how to make a paper mache deer head from scratch, I mentioned an optional ingredient: air drying paper clay. I used a homemade version, and I ended up liking it so much that I decided I'd share with you all how to make your own! I got the recipe from ultimatepapermache.com. That website is a great resource for almost anything paper mache, so if you're interested in anything like that, definitely go check it out, it's great.

Here's what you'll need for the paper clay.

To be more precise, you can measure out the dry toilet paper first. Toilet paper comes in different thicknesses, so for some brands it might take up the whole roll, but with the kind I have it was about 2/3rds of a roll.

Soak the toilet paper in warm water for a few minutes until it breaks apart.

Strain the toilet paper pulp and squeeze out the excess until it weighs 110 grams.

Break up the paper into your mixing bowl and then unceremoniously dump everything else in and mix together. I used a whisk attachment and then halfway through I switched to a dough hook. Also, you should use a mixing bowl/attachments dedicated towards craft things. No food allowed!

Dump the clay out into a surface dusted with corn flour and knead it for a few minutes.

Here it is, finished!

Store it in an airtight container. I wrapped mine in saran wrap and then put it in a zip lock bag.

This clay is pretty great, I really like working with it. It dries extremely strong, even when it's pretty thin. It takes fine detail and you can sand it after its dry. Also, since I used baby oil it smells kind of nice too.

 

Art, For the Home, Tutorials

DIY Paper-cut Light Box

chezlin ·

I recently saw some awesome artwork by these artists Hari and Deepti and I was very inspired to create some of my own. I threw together three tutorials; one is advanced, one is intermediate and one is easy. Check out the video below, or continue on after the "read more" tag, to figure out how to make your own!

A quick note about the lights I used in these light boxes. These things are great; you can cut them to size and they're self adhesive. Perfect for any project requiring a little bit of lighting. If you want to buy some for your own projects here are some affiliate links for the lights, extra connector things and power cords. If you don't feel like buying these things you can probably just use some Christmas lights, but the downside to those is that you'd only have a tiny bit of the lights inside the box, and then you'd have a long tail of lights hanging out of it. Unless you build a big box to accommodate a whole string of lights. Which would be awesome.

Advanced:

Advanced!

 

Mouse over or click on the images for instructions:

Intermediate:

Intermediate!

 

Click here to download the template for this one.

Mouse over or click on the images for instructions:

Easy:

Easy

Mouse over or click on the images for instructions:

Finished!

So there we go! Three different light boxes, three different levels of difficulty. I hope you all enjoyed these things, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, and I'm already planning a few more to make!