Victorian Belsnickel - Part 8

Aluminum foil armature.

Armature covered with clay.

I am late getting onto the blog today. I woke up with a plan.  In a moment of irony, the universe decided that my plan was going to go out the window.  As I scanned the local newspaper while eating breakfast, I saw the a horoscope on the last page.  It said something to the effect that it was not safe to assume that everything was on track.  Really, I am not making this up.  Part of my plan was to make the main dish for dinner this morning because it is something that takes a long time to make.  That way I would not be so rushed this afternoon.  It is one of those dishes that sounds so simple, essentially a spoonbread with onions, bell peppers, and cheese added, but it seems to take every bowl in the kitchen, and most of the small appliances.  Part of the meal is processed in a food processor.  The latch on the food processor broke.  I had to pull out the blender to get things mixed to the right consistency.  It took a lot longer with the blender.  Along the way, I found out that I did not have enough of a key ingredient for dinner tomorrow night.  I will need to make a trip to the store sometime today.  And on it goes.  So I am now starting to blog at the time I am usually finishing and hitting publish.  Well, sometime that is how things goes.  My apologies to people that came online trying to read it early.

Adding the nose.

Before I get started on the latest on the doll, I have one more thing to say.  I am celebrating today.  My blog has just reached it's 10,000th  page view.  Compared to some of the blogs out there, that is not much.  But this is a personal blog, and they don't have the same type of readership that blogs related to news or television programs have, so this is a big deal for me.  It means that a lot of readers have taken the time to click on my blog and at least look at what I have put up there.  I find that encouraging.  If readers would like to leave comments or ask questions I would be happier still.  I would like the blog to be more interactive.

Eyes pressed into the clay.

Now on to the Victorian Belsnickel.  This week I have been working on making the face out of bake in the oven polymer clay.  I am not going to give a full account of all the measuring and shaping that goes on  because it is just too much to put in a blog post.  There is plenty of information online about this and the books I recommended in the earlier posts have very detailed instructions on this.  I do hope to show the different stages of the build and give a few thoughts on them.  I ask that readers remember that I am still learning this craft and that they won't expect perfection.  Learning the skill of making accurate faces takes a while.  The only way to get any better at it is to do it until you aquire skill in the techniques.

Once cheek smoothed and one ready to add to the face.

I have a mantra that I use when I am making a clay head:  "It's not finished until it is finished."  A head is built up from numerous layers of clay.  Each layer is shaped and reshaped many times over the course of making the head.  At one point it looks right then you add clay in a different area and then you have to reshape the first layer to look right in relation to the layer you just added.  It is a long process.  Along the way it is normal for me to think that this is never going to work.  I just have to keep encouraging myself through it until I reach something that I think I can accept.

Before baking.

After baking.

Before you add clay, you have to have an armature for the clay to go onto.  The head is not made out of solid clay.  The clay rests over the armature.  For a head, the basic armature is an egg shape.  I made an egg out of aluminum foil.  I have seen it recommended in one book to use the clay over a styrofoam ball.  I have never seen styrofoam used with bake in the oven clay so I am not comfortable on using the styrofoam in the oven until I learn more about it.  I guess that will be research for another day.  For this project I folded and wrapped numerous layers of aluminum foil until I had a very firm egg shape.  I rolled, pushed, mashed, pressed the foil until it had an egg shape that was firm enough to stand up to the layering of the clay.  You can't just ball up some foil and say that you are ready to go.  I spent about forty minutes shaping the ball until it was firm by rolling it between my hands, pushing it against the table,  and prodding it with my thumbs.  Just another note on the armature at this point.  Remember to make it a little smaller than your planned your finished size because you will be adding clay and eventually hair on top of it.  Expect the size of the head to grow as you progress with the build.  You always have to be thinking ahead when making the armature.

After the armature was as I wanted it to be, I added a layer of clay.  This clay is a mix of 2 parts flesh tone to one part of translucent clay.  In previous heads, I have found that the flesh tone alone bakes to a darker color than I wanted.  Those dolls seem to be a little too tanned, especially if I am making a winter doll like a Santa or a Belsnickel.  The clay has to be kneaded together and made pliable before you start putting the clay on the doll.  It is very stiff when you first start out.  I find that it is helpful to put the clay in a plastic bag and put it in my pocket for a while so that it softens a little bit before beginning the conditioning process.  As the clay softens I start kneading and mixing the clay.  Then I start running it through a craft "pasta" machine to make smooth blended sheets of clay to work with.  (If you don't have a clay pasta machine, use a rolling pin that you have dedicated to craft use only.  Never use a utensil you plan to use with food.)  This is not a once and you are done process.  I may run it through the clay machine about thirty times.  It takes a long time to get the clay well blended.  If you don't blend it well enough, you might find spots that did not blend will show up in the baked product as a spot of a lighter or darker color.  One light spot ended up on the face.  In this case, it will be covered by the beard, so it is not going to be a problem.

After the sheets of clay are placed over the armature the seams are rubbed until the armature is smoothly covered with clay.  Then the build up begins.  More clay is added to build up the forehead.  The nose is added and shaped.  ( Expect to be shaping and reshaping features throughout the build.)  Eyes are added along with eye lids.  Then the mouth and whatever that little piece is called under the nose.  Cheeks and ears.  And so on.  Eventually it starts to look like a face.  This takes a while.  I worked on it for seven and a half hours over two days, before I reached something I was comfortable with.  I tried to add a few character lines along the eyes and the forehead, but I did not make them deep enough and they more or less faded out during the baking process.

Once the features were on, I added the neck.  The neck was created by a roll of foil covered with clay.  More clay was added to attache the neck to the head.  Many times in doll making a head is made from an egg shape and no neck is used.  Since the face of the doll will have a beard and the back of the head will be covered with a hood it would not be very noticeable if the neck was missing.  However, I am trying to improve my sculpting skill so I added the neck.  The roll of the neck is hollow.  The wire armature from the doll torso will extend up through the neck and into the head when it is placed on the body.  

I find that at some point you have to stop working on a head.  If you keep working beyond a certain point, I just start messing things up.  This is somewhat like painting.  If you keep adding and adding you have lost the original form of the painting.  Once I worked on it until I thought I could not do more, I baked the doll in the oven.  Truth be told, this head was larger that most heads I work on so I baked it in my regular oven because I was afraid it would scorch in the toaster oven.  I ran the cleaning cycle afterwards as is recommended.  Note that the color of the clay deepened slightly after it was baked.

As usual, there are always some things I could have done better.  The nose is a little wide at the tip.  On this head, I think I should have done a better job of the eye lids.  The eyes are a little wider open than eyes would normally be on a human.  In fact, now that I think of it they look like the eyes on a doll that has closeable eye lids.  They are either wide open or closed.  Next doll I will concentrate harder on trying to get the eyelids to look right.  I could go in and try to add them to this doll and re-bake the head but I decided that I did not want to attempt it on this doll.  If the clay baked a different color it might look stranger than the wide eyes.  I am going to use the head as it because once the eyebrows, beard, mustache, and hair are added it might not be such an obvious flaw.

So I have done as much as I am prepared to do on the head.  Next I start working on the hands.  This will be my first time building hands over an armature.  I will be blogging about that as the next part of the process of making the doll.  Check back on Sunday for the next blog post.