Wee Pandora (b.4 February 2010)

Well, would you believe it - another Wee Horse! Meet Pandora, the feisty bay mare commissioned by Helen through the website at the end of January. Thanks to Helen for letting me post a picture of her beautiful horse.

I tried a new technique with Wee Pandora. Her coat is fairly uniform dark brown, apart from one white sock, a white blotch on her withers and a white star and a smattering of a blaze. You can see how her face fades from dark brown to tan, and I wanted to find out the best way to achieve this effect.

First of all, I made up the dark brown body and head by blending chocolate brown with black. Then I took a small amount of this clay and made a Skinner blend with some tan clay. This created a lovely blend between the two colours, and I rolled the resultant sheet out very thinly using the pasta machine.

I had already shaped the head using the dark brown clay, and I used the thin Skinner sheet as a veneer, placing it carefully over the head so that the blended part was near the bottom of the head. I carefully cut out the shape of the head from the Skinner sheet and rolled it onto the head, being careful not to trap any air bubbles.

I do love using the Skinner blend technique on some of the wee creatures I make. The effects are great - I am particularly fond of Wee Donk. However, it is quite a time-consuming method, as not only must the two or more colours be rolled some 20 times through the pasta machine, but the clay gets wider with each pass, so I've also got to reshape the clay back into a rectangle after each pass so that the clay continues to be blended correctly. And once I have a flat sheet of clay, there's the question of shaping it into something three dimensional. It's not so bad when I use the veneer technique, as I did for Wee Pandora, but for three dimensional shapes, like Wee Donk, I need to roll the sheet into a plug, and then shape it from there, doing my best to keep the blended area as intact as possible.

It's so great working out ways of creating the effects I want when making up these wee creatures. Polymer clay is truly a wonderful medium to work with.

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