Requiem Art

Ok, my power supply is still out for repairs, which means no pictures until it returns. This works well with this story, because there are no pictures of it.

So. Wanna hear the sad, sad (and embarrassing) tale?

Here goes: Sometime during the first year I began customizing pullips, I had a bait Serpant Namu. It was my mission to make Namus look less…Namu. I hit on a plan to make a Phantom of the Opera Namu where I could sculpt a mask with more pleasing features, and have a scary Namu underneath. Perfect!

At the time, no one in the MLP or Pullip community had discovered Apoxie sculpt, and the only air-drying clays I could find were nasty paper-mache type things. It was basically sculpey or nothing, if I wanted to have the mask ‘fit’ the face.

You can bake a pony in the oven with sculpey. It makes the pony somewhat jiggly at full temperature. I didn’t want to risk full temperature, but I also knew that I had two other options open to me: boiling it, or baking it at a lower temperature for a longer time. Boiling water seemed more risky than a slow bake at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, so I decided to try a slow bake first.

The mask was sculpted over the doll head after I’d wrapped the head with plastic wrap, popped it in the oven, and checked 5 minutes in. No problems! The head was still hard at that heat, the clay was curing (slowly) so I let it go another 20 minutes.

The next time I checked on it, the clay was still obviously not done, but the weirdest thing happened: cracks were forming through the mask. The head still looked fine. I took it out, patched up the cracks, popped it back in the oven, let it go longer, took it out and…new cracks!

I’d never had anything like that happen before, so I took it out and let it cool to see if the clay had just swelled in the oven. It was definitely too big for the head. The head, after 40 minutes or so in the oven was still perfectly hard but it looked off somehow. I thought it might have deformed, so I tried to fit it to the backplate and…

…it was about 1/2″ smaller in height. The head… had shrunk. Whoopsie!

So yeah. I threw it out. I am not aware of any ways to enlarge plastic, and without a back plate that fit, it would never be a doll again. And I’ve never put a pullip in the oven since, no matter how low the temperature ^^;