Victorian Belsnickel - Part 10

Wire armature and fingers.

Base layer of the hand.

I had a quiet day on Friday, so I decided that since I had a fair amount of time I would try to work on the hands.  Sometimes I have great ideas, but whether I can pull them off is another question.  In this case it was an almost.  As my father used to tell me, "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."  And hereby hangs the tale of my sculpting a hand.  I did sculpt a hand.  As things went along I began to question whether my armature was going to be strong enough for my plan to have the hand grasping a bunch of switches.  The armature not only supports the clay, it needs to be strong enough to hold the accessories as well. Sometimes you have to change the plan.  There is a surprise ending to this, not necessarily a good one.  But, for those interested in creating doll hands I have provided the photos of the building of the hand. 

I was following the directions in one of the books I recommended earlier, Sculpting Lifelike Figures in Polymer Clay by Katherine Dewey.  I will say that her directions were very good, but it took me a while to understand her explanation of modeling unit, a measuring device for making sure that your bits of clay are equal measures.  After that, the directions were easy to follow. 

Adding depth.

The first delay was a trip to the craft store.  I needed to have a certain type of vinyl glue.  Regular white glue specifically states that it is not to be heated.  Polymer clay is a bake in the oven clay so white glue could not be used.  Once I had the glue, the wires that form the hand armature needed to be coated with two coats of the glue.  The glue took a while to dry.  I had to do one coat in the morning and the other in the late afternoon and leave it overnight. 

Creating the knuckles and adding muscle.

Knuckles and positioning the thumb.

Next was sculpting the fingers.  It was a case of easier said than done.  When you are working on a doll, the hand is not overly large.  Trying to get detail in a small size is not easy.  It takes a lot of persistence to get it to look right.  Or perhaps I was just over thinking the whole thing.  After the fingers you build up the hands.  Lumps of clay were added to create depth.  Lumps of clay were added to create the knuckles, and palms.  Lines were sculpted in to create detail for the fingers, knuckles, and tendons.  As with the face, it is not just a case of slap on some clay and you are done.  Each little lump of clay must be pushed, prodded, caressed and stroked into the shape you want it to be.  Each finger had to be rolled individually.  It takes a while.  In fact, this one hand, scarcely bigger than the diameter of a quarter took me four and a half hours, not counting the baking.  One hand took me an entire morning.  Not having sculpted hands on an armature before, I had no real idea of how long it would take.  I had hoped to be finished with both of them.

Hand in position to hold the bundle of switches.

And then I baked the hand.  And that is where the surprise ending happened.  Polymer clay is wonderful when it comes out right, but awful when it comes out wrong.  If you don't bake the clay enough, it will crumble.  If you bake it too long it will scorch.  And that is what happened with this hand.  It was baked on a bedding of polyester fiberfill as per the books directions, but apparently one place did not have enough padding and has a bad burn mark.  I must say it was a leap of faith to use this bedding of fiberfill in the oven.  I was worried that I was going to set the oven, if not the kitchen on fire.  Not only did it scorch, the entire hand baked an entirely different color from the face, even though it was made from the same batch of clay.  I was very disappointed.  I did not think the hand came out half bad for a first attempt and making it. 

Hand burned in the oven.

It is possible that I could salvage the hand by sanding the burnt area and painting it.  However, by this time I was questioning whether the wire armature in the arm was going to be sturdy enough to support the weight of the hand and the bunch of switches.  (Note: the wire you see on the hand is not the wire armature for the arm.)  Another consideration was the switches themselves.  To have a bunch of switches that were proportional to the doll meant that the bits of wood needed to be very tiny.  That meant that the pieces would be brittle.  I considered making the switches from clay with a wire armature but they would still be small enough that I would have to consider breakage.  Time to rethink my idea.

Note the color differential in the clay. 

So I do have a new, more traditional idea for the Victorian Belsnickel.  I need to finish the beard and hair, then I will be blogging more about the change in plans.  And then I will begin working on accessories for the piece.  Check back Thursday for the latest on the doll.