Materials: CellyClay, toilet paper, glue, acrylic paint, sealer.
I began this by making four small CelluClay tiles. When they had dried, I fused them together into one larger tile, and smoothed it out with grinding and sanding. This formed the base of the project. Next, I built up this sunken-skull thing. I thought it looked kind of cool and interesting.
I painted it stony grey using various thin layers of watery paint.
The project normally would have ended after I painted it. But there were a couple of small cracks in the surface and other details that I didn’t like, so I ground them out. I started filling them back in, but around this time I stopped working on CelluClay projects. This sat unfinished, needing some more patching and repainting, for about ten years.
While working on my toilet-paper mask, I had some extra material lying around, and already had the grinder set up and so forth, so I decided to just finish this. It actually didn’t take long to fill in the old spots and get this sanded up.
I decided not to try to blend the paint, but to just repaint the whole thing. First I painted it white to get it uniform, then I did the thin layer routine again. This time around I think my skills were a little more developed. I also decided to paint the skull a different color than the “stone”—originally it was all uniformly grey, like a carved stone bas-relief instead of a fossil in a rock.
Because this had already been painted and sealed, it was hard to get the thin layers of paint to stick in some spots without rubbing off when I added newer layers. But otherwise there were no big surprises in the process. It’s nice to have it finished.