Hello Internet Lovelies!
I hope that you are all doing fantastic, where ever you are.
So I have been toying with making food out of some polymer clay for quite some time now (in fact it was one of the main reasons I started buying the stuff) but, until now, I have not really gotten around to it.
Over the last few days however, in between working on my embroidery project and binge watching Family Guy, I have managed to make a fair bit of miniature food!
This has definitely been one of the most enjoyable projects I have done, and, because the clay is so versatile and the varieties of food that we have available to us is so vast, I daresay that I won't run out of ideas/options for other dishes/platters any time soon...
For the moment, I have some hamburgers, with either fries or onion rings; a variety of doughnuts; some melting moments (cookies); and finally a cheese plate with some grapes, accompanied by slices of bread and water crackers...
Now, most of these things are pretty straight forward to make. All that you need to do is shape the clay into the desired form and texture it accordingly. I use a toothbrush, a needle tool and a few different sized dotting tools.
The 'icing' on the doughnuts and the sauce on the burgers is simply a TLS (Translucent Liquid Suclpey) and soft pastel mixture (in some cases tiny bits of the desired shade of clay rather than pastel can be used, but I find that this is rather tedious to mix in and can take quite a bit of time and effort).
One of the more complicated things in this project was the tomato (not all that visible in this instance).
Here's how I made the tomato cane:
I started as always by mixing the right shades of clay that I thought would be required. These range from dark/deep red for the skin of the fruit, to a pale pink for the pulp. I also had some shades of yellow and orange. All of them had varying quantities of translucent mixed in as well.
Starting the cane proper, I took the palest of the clay and made a triangle with it.
On the point of said triangle I placed a thin sheet of a pale orange.
Two pieces of the same pale pink as the starting pink. I simply rolled a snake to the right with and fattened them before adding to the rest of my cane.
Putting aside the first part for a moment to make the seeds. I used two shades of yellow, a pale canary yellow and a mustard yellow. I also had a shade of green, orange and brown. None of these had any translucent mixed in with them.
I started with the pale yellow, rolling it into a snake and simply layered it with a sheet of each of the other colours. The order I used is as follows: Pale followed by mustard yellow, orange, green brown.
Once these are all ready I reduced the cane to the desired size. Once I had it as thick as I wanted, I flattened one end of the snake to achieve the tear drop shape of the seeds.
I then simply cut this cane into 8 equal pieces (it doesn't matter how many, so long as they are all the same size).
I then stacked them as in the picture, placing a thin strip of the same pale pink as in the triangle in between each 'seed'.
Wrapping the seeds with sheets of clay ranging from palest to darkest pink with a few layers/strips of translucent orange mixed in there too.
Once I was happy with the size and look of this segment I reduced the cane again. I will suggest, however, that you to try doing this by stretching carefully rather than rolling to keep the shape.
When you are happy with the size simply cut the cane into 5 equal pieces. (Can you see where this is going now?)
Before putting the seeded pieces together , cover each of them with a thin sheet of pale, semi-translucent red. Place a thin snake of the same shade in the middle and in between each of the rounded parts of the seed segments.
(Almost done!) Finally, layer the remaining red shades around the cane to complete the tomato, again going from the palest to the darkest of the reds.
Reduce one final time and slice.
Before baking the slices, I put a bit of texture in the seeded parts of the tomato, just to make it a little more realistic.
For the lettuce I simply took a few shades of green and mixed them together. Make sure that they are NOT mixed together well.
This is a good blend. I then sliced thin slices of the 'lettuce' and tore them.
This was the end result.
With the hard part done, all that is left now is to 'build' the burger.
I started with some dough coloured clay. (For some reason I neglected to take a picture of adding texture or shading to the top of the buns, but I used the same method as for the bottom bun. For the sesame seeds on top I simply used a few tiny bits of the same dough coloured clay, but without the shading)
Added some texture with my needle tool and some shading using soft pastels and a paintbrush.
Brown and yellow clay to make the hamburger patty and the cheese, respectively.
Both with texture added to make it look a little more real. In this instance I used both dotting tools and a needle tool. I again added a bit of shading in the 'grill' marks on the patty, using my soft pastels.
In all honestly, however, these details are just for the OCD in me, as they are not likely to be seen.
and the tomato (see the texture added to them?). In this case I also added some onion slices. The onion is made with a very thin snake of a purple and white partial mix (similar to the lettuce, but just with fewer colours).
As a final touch, I mixed some white soft pastels with TLS (Translucent Liquid Sculpey) and "drizzled" that on in a sort of zig-zag pattern.
Finally to plate up.
The plate I made with a simple circular shape. Nothing fancy there. The napkin is just that, a tissue cut a bit smaller and glued onto the plate.
For the side salad I just used the same technique to achieve the lettuce and make segments out of my tomato cane (rather than slices). The onions are also the same as on the burger.
That's that. The boxes I made out of simple cardboard and used a bit of sticky tape for the "plastic". The bread board I made by tracing the basic shape onto a piece of balsa wood and simply sanded the edges to a rounded finish and finally sealed it with glaze. Everything else I made using the polymer clay.
If you need any further instructions on any of the other foods, just let me know and I'll be happy to do another tutorial post.
And so peeps,
Until next time,
ACL.
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