#or was before its tail broke off

I am working on a big sculpting project (not as in huge, but it’s going to be pretty great), but I needed to test a new way to cure it, one piece at a time.

I normally put my sculpts in the oven, all curing at the same time, but that makes it tricky towards the end of the actual sculpting, to not smear any details out that I’ve already finished.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished a bear (my biggest sculpt yet), that I had finished and cured in pieces - first completing the head, then the back, then the front, then the hind legs, then it was done.

For the project I’m working on now… that won’t work. (As I added another layer of clay to the base layer for the bear, but this one can’t get another layer easily.) So I wondered if I could boil it, like I used to do with my small whale sculpts when I started doing this, but only one part at a time - without any of the other clay stiffening as well.

So I needed to do an experiment, but instead of just making a cheap shape of the same length and clay thickness as this sculpture, I thought why not make a quick whale. A beluga base that turned into a southern right whale dolphin… no, a northern right whale dolphin… head a bit big, a bit unpolished, but it took me two damn days and then I was finished.

Boiled the tail. The rest was soft.

Boiled it up to the pecs. The rest was soft.

Finished curing the whole dolphin. “I’ll paint it some other time”

I made the fins and flippers in the flexible cosclay, which I’ve had great experience with before, so now after cooling, I bent them to see how far- crack.

And crack and crack and crack.

Shite.

*Sighs* Oh well.

At least the experiment was successful.

Now I need to make another experiment, where I make similar shapes of cosclay and put two in the oven, two in the pot, and see if boiling makes cosclay fragile (because it’s awesome in the oven).

Edit: Double shite. The boiled cosclay pieces (simple spirals) fall to pieces like nothing, after cooling properly. The ones from the oven are practically indestructible. I am working on a mammoth, and both its tail and trunk must be of cosclay, so I know now I can’t boil it… the experiment with the dolphin was successful but completely unnecessary if cosclay can’t hold after boiling.