Thank you!! All my fishies are made of air dry clay and acrylic paint. I exclusively use DAS brand clay because I find it easy to work with and Liquitex Basics acrylic paint because it’s affordable and has good pigmentation.

Once I know what fish I want to make, I start by sketching the fish to scale so that I have a roadmap I can compare things to as I work. It helps me keep the proportions consistent. Then I make a little base out of tin foil to reduce the amount of clay I’m using. The fish “guts” if you will.

I spend a few days on the sculpture portion depending on the size of the fish. There needs to be periods of drying time in between making certain parts or the clay will collapse on itself as I work with it.

Once everything’s fully dry, I take another day or so to smooth out and patch areas that are too lumpy before painting.

I usually paint in one sitting over a few hours because that’s the most helpful for me when it comes to color mixing and blending paints for gradients.

I feel my process is pretty efficient but making the fish tends to require a lot of my creative energy so I often take long hiatuses from working on them. I still like making them though! Even if it’s been a while since I’ve done so.

I’m making wings out of apoxie sculpt to wrap around my cane and these are two iterations that just didn’t end up working.

With apoxie you have about an hour of work time once you combine the products together and then they become too hard to manipulate (it’s about 12 to cure to full hardness). Once I realized what I was doing wouldn’t work it was too late to really salvage the apoxie and I ended up dumping all of it from both of these attempts. It sucks having to lose material (especially when it isn’t cheap), but I still had a lot left and I still wanted to see if I could make my idea work.