These tools (Kemper) are pretty much the only ones I use for all projects. I especially appreciate them because they are double-ended, with exception of the ‘Exacto Knife’. The specific stock numbers are as follows: A3N Lace Tool (pointed stylus/spade); DBSL (double-ball stylus); PAS (spatula). The Exacto Knife’ can be purchased at hardware stores.

One of the most important things about layering and 'Clay Painting' is the type of clay used. The base clay of your sculpture or the 'Canvas' of your 'Clay Painting' needs to be one of the stiffer clays, ie; Kato, Premo or Original Fimo. The reason for this is to give your layering clays a some-what hard surface so they will glide and blend easily. And these layering clays themselves must also be of a certain type, namely, the softer clays such as Fimo soft or Sculpey III... Sculpey III being the absolute best of the two because it reaches an almost soft, buttery consistency with ease of conditioning. The more 'buttery' the texture, the more smooth the layering and blending. I cannot stress this enough... that the real secret behind successful 'Clay Painting' is this 'buttery' consistency of the layering clay. And when it comes to layering, a little clay goes a very long way!



>Directional layering and tool pressure:
There are only a few directional ways of applying color layers, and are quite simple with a little practice. In the following photos I have used a white fish template to represent a piece of white clay cut into a fish outline. So the white fish represents a white clay 'Base'. The blue represents the first colored layer. I place a small piece of rolled or slightly flattened blue clay on the top portion of the area to be covered. In order to cover the white clay smoothly, I use the 'spade' tool and with a medium pressure I spread the clay in the direction of the top, arching arrow. This spreading motion can best be described as 'spreading butter on a piece of bread'. If you were to cover the entire slice of bread, you would use wide, sweeping motions for the larger areas and small, finite moves for the edges. To spread the butter as thinly as possible, you would gently scrape and smooth the butter in downward motions to cover every bit of the bread. That is what we are doing here... but instead of soft butter, you are using soft clay! The downward arrows are simply the downward motions of spreading the clay smoothly onto the Base.




If you are doing a roundish area, you simply spread the clay in outward directions from the center. Tiny smudges of color are often spread in the same way using the large or small 'ball stylus'. When using the 'ball stylus', the pressure needs to be very light.



Blending:
When layering your next color and in areas where they blend into and over other colors... the same techniques for spreading clay 'like butter on bread' apply here as well.

Page 3 : Clay Painting Prep