How to make your own custom action figures using Sculpey III polymer clay.
Sculpey III is a polymer clay that hardens into a hard plastic when placed into an oven. Using the Sculpey and a bit of forming wire, you can form custom action figures in any pose, size, or shape you desire.
You start with bending the armature wire into the basic form of the creature you’re trying to model. You then press the Sculpey clay onto the frame creating the various muscles, joints, claws, hands, head(s), and all of that. Once that’s done, you bake it!
The Instructable even goes as far as making a package for your figure so that it appears to have come from a retail store.
How hard does this stuff get after it is cooked? Will it make a good motor mount for model airplanes?
P.S. I got the first message.
holy crap this is the best idea ever!
i have some ideals to create a different type of action figures,need so suggestions
Polymer clays are often used to make figures and other sculpts (from simple and whimsical ones to quite realistic and/or elegant ones, etc). But the 3 lines from the Polyform company called original Sculpey (boxed), SuperSculpey (flesh-boxed), and Sculpey III (colors, pkgs) are more brittle after curing in any thin or projecting areas than the other brands/lines of polymer clay. They can still be used (especially SuperSculpey) if that’s kept in mind (and perhaps with wire or other armatures underneath) and in fact often are used, especially by those who simply want to paint over their clay sculpts rather than using colored clays. The longer polymer clays are cured, the stronger they’ll be though no matter which brand so baking SS a long time will make it less brittle (though also darken it).
The “stronger” polymer clays available in the U.S. are brands/lines like Premo, Kato PolyClay, FimoClassic, Cernit, SuperSculpey-Firm, and to a lesser degree FimoSoft. Those clays will have surfaces that are a little less “hard” than the more brittle ones, but that gives strength… if those are stressed when thin, they’ll simply bend rather than snapping.
(Lots of info on brands, baking, figures, etc, at my site glassattic.com, if anyone is interested.)
How to make the shape of that figure?i still don’t understand.
Would it work to sculpt all the basic seperate parts of the action figure, like hinges, axels for the hinges, ball joints, etc, depending on how posable you want it, including the face on the head, then bake the clay,let it cure, and afterward, use a hairdryer to loosen up the plastic, put the figure together with the loose plastic, let it cure again, then add other pieces on the character, I.E. if he had long hair, you would sculpt that, and then boil all the other parts on, and then paint it with acrylic paint? That’s what I’m planning on doing, even though it would be time consuming.