Recommendation for art materials

[Meowster]

Hello all,

I'm looking for advice from you artists out there. I want to start making some basic jewellery, for instance earrings in the shape of sushi or cupcakes etc. I am guessing whatever material I make it out of needs to be hard and light, like plastic... but easy to mould, like clay. I also don't know what paint I should use in order to colour them?

What recommendations do you guys have? I have no idea how to go about doing this. Clay seems like it might be too heavy or would break too easily, but then I don't know a great deal about clay. All suggestions welcome

[ThreeOhFour]

Ask Erin! 

[GuyAwesome]

You might want to look into Fimo. It's a lightweight oven-hardening modelling clay (not as brittle as 'normal' clay, more of a soft plastic), comes in a lot of colours, good for jewellery etc, fairly cheap and available at most craft/arty stores AFAIK. At least, it used to be.

Official Site.

(Sorry If that sounds too much like an advertising spiel There's probably other brands out there, Fimo's just the first one I thought of.)

EDIT: Reading the comments in that link, it looks like Erin used Fimo there.

[Meowster]

super, thanks!

Wow, the Weighted Companion Cube is a briliant idea

Yeah this looks like the sort of stuff I need. Anyone have any recommendations for modelling with it? To make things like sushi pieces or cupcakes, I'll need to create certain effects (for instance, rice-looking textures). Any special tools recommended?

[Evil]

Strangely, I just got done with a project like this. I made a few small sushi shapes out of Sculpy and put shepard's hooks on them. First I rolled a ball of tin foil to about the size I wanted, crushing the foil lightly so it had little weight. Then I bundled a few coils to make rice shapes and cut the ends off and attached them to two flat sides of the foil ball. Then I wrapped the whole thing with a green sheet for the algae wrap. Poke a few jewelry settings in to it and presto, cheap maki earrings ready to be baked hard. Not as cool as Ivy's work, but hey, it's something!

When modeling with ceramics, I use a small needle tool, a wooden fenneling knife, and a plastic spoon/ball combo like this. But really, you could use whatever you feel comfortable with. A toothpick and a screwdriver were my favorite tools before I bought some legit ones. But, if you have the money, these things are really awesome to play with. But if you plan on buying tools, buy them in person after you've experimented a lot to see what works and what doesn't. I've seen some awesome results from classmates using bark to press textures into clay, but you could use almost anything you find. You can even make a texture into clay, then bake it, then have a new texture tool.

As far as clay goes, the only home bake clay I've used is sculpy. I've heard good things about Fimo and there are some other clays used to make models for silicon molds that might work well. Tin foil works great for cutting weight, but sometimes you have to wear heavy earrings for fashion.

Sculpy comes in a bunch of colors, but when I'm cheap, I just paint the white kind. Acrylic paint works well, but it's hard to get a consistent look. Testors paints have a better finish, but they're harder to control. Acrylic you can paint over or scratch off, but with testors you have one shot to get it right. But if you buy sculpy, you can blend colors to make new ones. Colored clay makes things a lot easier in the end.