Cerise Magazine

May 2007 Issue

Features

• From the Editors
• Craft Check: Make Your Own Miniatures

Articles

• 5 Steps to Attract Girl Gamers
  Author: Latoya Peterson

Latoya gives game designers five simple suggestions for tapping into a greater share of the potential female video gamer market.

• Playing With Patriarchy
  Author: Natalie Hill

Is video gaming a "boys' club"? Natalie looks at what casual misogyny can do to girl and women gamers.

• Lagging Behind
  Author: Lindsey Galloway

What games do girls want to play? Lindsey takes a look at the "Girls' Games Movement" and the future of gender in games.

• Girls Don't Play Video Games
  Author: Nick Cummings

Do girls play video games? Nick revisits this myth and talks about why it may be more damaging than it first appears.

Reviews

• Final Fantasy III
  by Ariel Wetzel

 

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Having trouble finding miniatures that accurately reflect the characters you’re creating for your tabletop RPGs? Prefer sculpting to painting? Have more time than money? Why not try making your own miniatures out of polymer clay?

Polymer clay bakes to permanency in a household oven, is not terribly expensive, and can be purchased in a wide variety of colors – which can also be blended together to create new colors, or painted after baking. Miniatures sculpted from polymer clay are colorful, quirky, and reasonably durable. And if any body parts should fall off during a tumble from the gaming table, replacements can be sculpted and glued on with little trouble.

Cost: variable, depending on how many colors of clay you purchase. A nice pack of several starter-sized blocks in different colors will run somewhere between $10 and $30, US.

Time: at least a few hours.

Skill level: this craft will be easier for someone with some experience in sculpting, particularly with polymer clay, but it’s not too daunting for beginners.

Equipment: you’ll need polymer clay (the example miniature in this tutorial was created with Sculpey III clay), access to an oven, and a glass baking pan of some kind (a pie plate works particularly well). Airtight containers of some kind (plastic sandwich bags work well) will help keep your leftover clay soft. Commercially available sculpting tools can be very useful, but a butter knife and a few toothpicks work just fine. A large plate to work on, some commercial miniatures to compare heights against, and any ovenproof findings you might like to use in your creations (glass beads for eyes, perhaps) will round out your equipment list.

Arrange your materials on your working surface, put on some music or something for background, and settle in for a good crafting session!

Step 1: Plan your miniature

For this tutorial, I decided to make a female magic-user figure. Miniatures that will be wearing robes or dresses are usually easier to create than those in pants, shorts, or armor, and I recommend them as a starting-point, particularly for those new to working with clay. The techniques demonstrated in this tutorial should be applicable to a wide variety of miniature types, however, with a little effort and imagination.

The first thing to do is to visualize how your miniature will look when you’re done. You may wish to change details as you go along, but an overall sense of the composition will help you not to waste clay. Once you’ve got an idea of what you’re going to create, try to mentally break the figure down into component parts that can be sculpted from balls, cylinders, ropes and flattened sheets of clay in different colors.

Step 2: Create your shapes

Choose the colors you will use (creating them first, if necessary), and mold your shapes. You can pinch bits off the blocks of clay with your fingers, but slicing off small chunks with the butter knife is easier. Be sure to leave a little bit aside of any colors you blend yourself – you might need a tiny bit more, later, and it’s difficult to match a blended color exactly. If you have a commercial miniature or two handy, use them as rough guides to help you figure out how large to make your pieces.

Warm the clay up by squeezing and rolling it between your fingers, and then create the balls, cylinders, ropes, and sheets you will use by rolling and/or pressing the clay between your hands or against your work surface.

For my demonstration miniature, I blended up a skin tone, and opted to use a cool dark blue clay with sparkles for the clothing and black for the shoes. For the torso, which won’t show under the robes, I used some neon pink – it’s a color that comes in most clay packs, and for which I’ve found very few other uses. Leftover clay from other projects will work just as well, and for a torso without too much detail on it crumpled-up tinfoil can also be used.

A quick note on colors: If you use any dark colors, particularly shades of red, you’ll want to stop and wash your hands periodically as you work to avoid tinting the other shades of clay in your composition. Be especially careful when changing from working with red clay to working with white.

In the picture above, you can see that I broke my mental miniature down into the component pieces of, from top to bottom:

• head: a ball
• neck/upper chest: a curved sheet
• breasts: small balls
• sleeves: triangular sheets
• arms: cylinders rolled into cones
• torso: cylinder
• robe body: rectangular sheet
• shoes: flattened balls

Step 3: Refine and assemble your shapes

The next step is to begin assembling some of the parts, and to make others more nearly resemble what they are meant to represent. For the demonstration miniature, I added a nose to the head by pressing a tiny triangle of leftover brown clay onto it and smoothing it down. I made the arms thinner by rolling them against my work surface, and pinched out mitten-like hands. I smoothed the neck and breast pieces onto the top of the torso, and attached the feet to the bottom. I refined the shapes of the sleeves and robe body.

From there, simply continue assembling pieces. Roll the robe body around the torso, and smooth down the join in the back. Roll the sleeves around the arms, and attach them behind the neck. Put the head on.

Step 4: Add decorative touches

You may wish to add a little bit of decoration as you go – for the demonstration miniature, I rolled out a very thin rope of dark brown for a belt, used a triangle of the same clay for a component pouch attached to the belt, and then made a staff for the miniature to grasp.

Step 5: Make the face

To add eyes to the face, press a toothpick lightly into the clay near the bridge of the nose and use an upward rolling motion to carve out an eye socket. Repeat on the other side. Eyes made from glass beads work very well. Tiny balls of white clay with even tinier balls of black pressed into them will make handy eyes, too, though it can be hard to make them match. In the case of the demonstration miniature, I liked the slightly sarcastic-looking expression that two different-sized eyes produced, and I deliberately heightened the effect by adjusting the eyebrow ridges with my toothpick once the eyes had been placed into the sockets.

Finish off the face with some sort of mouth. A simple indentation made with the toothpick will do, or you can use clay of an appropriate color to create more accentuated lips.

Step 6: Add finishing touches

Add any other details you want to include on your miniature – hair can be made from a flattened, irregular sheet, or very thin ropes, and ears are easily created with tiny balls of clay, and can be pointed at one end for non-human miniatures. You might also experiment with creating capes and cloaks, hats and helmets, backpacks, and a variety of tools and weapons for your miniatures to hold.

Step 7: Clean up, and bake your miniature

When you’ve completed one miniature, you can set it aside while you work on others. When you’re all done sculpting for the day, put your leftover clay into airtight storage of some kind, preheat your oven, and bake your miniatures in a glass baking pan according to the directions on your clay packaging.

Once your miniature has cooled completely, it’s ready to use!

A few other tips and tricks:

1. If your miniature doesn’t stand up well on its own, you can sculpt a one-inch-square base, bake it, and glue the miniature’s feet onto it. This will help prevent tipping.
2. When making swords or other large flat objects that need to be straight, refrigerate the pieces for about twenty minutes before pressing them together, and then bake them immediately. The cold will help them keep their shape until they’ve baked hard.
3. For miniatures with tricky poses, use wire to create an armature to build the clay up around.
4. Don’t stick to humanoids – polymer clay can make fantastic dragons and other monsters.
5. The techniques you’ve learned from working with polymer clay can be used to sculpt impermanent miniatures out of modeling clay or wax, too.