The mermaid begins

The fairy idea is now morphing into a mermaid because I thought to myself “If I can make a dead fairy, I can make a dead mermaid”. This is harder than the fairy I found out on day one. More on that later.

In any case, I took one of the 6 inch Skelie’s and took his legs off because mermaids don’t have legs. (duh) From there I made an armature for the tail using wire, masking tape and aluminum. I covered that with polymer clay, texturized it with one of my clay tools, then baked per the instructions. I texturized it because it makes the gnarly stuff stick better than to smooth clay.



So, a side note here. The first tail did not come out okay at all. I will take a picture if I think to later. Even though the armature was thin enough, with the addition of clay, it became bulky looking. I went back to the drawing board, googled a ton of pictures of fins and then started with a much skinnier (it looked too skinny) armature prior to clay. I am not 100% happy with it, but it did come out alright and in the end I decided to work with that; which I pictured. The issue is that in order to get the proper form in armature, it is too thick to be “dead” with clay. Oh well… Also, the clay did not cool all the way before I “tested” its fit with the top half and nearly broke it. Luckily I caught that in time and glued the crack before it became a pain.



Back to the doll herself. Unlike the mummified fairy, she needed to have the look of something that had been pulled from the ocean which presents some new challenges. I gave her skin all the way around the torso basically. Partly to give the illusion of a dried thing from the ocean and partly to more appropriately shift from full tail to bone up top.



I gave her more “seaweed” using tissue and then the sealer, paint, walnut ink, sealer, more paint treatment. This was the most time consuming part, because the layers have to totally dry in between. Days elapsed. You cannot speed this up, I tried. The embossing gun nearly caused a problem, I’d rather not talk about it, suffice to say these things smell bad when they start to burn. :)