Tinkerbell

This is a sculpture I'm working on for my mom.  Her miniature donkey "Tinkerbell" passed away recently and I thought it would be nice to have a little statue to remember her.

Rollover the image below to turn around the sculpture.

Here are some work-in-progress photos of the Tinkerbell statue.

This first photo is the very beginnings of the sculpture.  I used some wood blocks to bulk up the initial body shape, then a fairly thin layer of clay to start giving the actual donkey shape.  I also used Aluminum armature wire for the neck, face and ears.  This was all covered in paper and some thick masking tape to give the clay something to hold onto and again, to bulk it out without wasting clay.

Here I started shaping the donkey ears with thinner armature wire.

And added the tape for the clay to stick to.

It's really starting to look like a donkey now!  Next up is the wings.  You can see the start of the wings in this photo.  I am going to add feathers and muscle details at this point.

So I thought the sculpture looked great like it was, but it looked more like a full sized donkey, not a miniature (which Tinkerbell is).  I decided to risk it and cut the body shorter (which in turn makes the head look larger as well):

Here it is after I put it back together and added some more detail to the wings.  I still have lots of detail to add to the wings and fur texture to the whole thing!

Here I started building the box for the rubber mold.

Here is the finished mold box:

So after I tried sealing the clay sculpture with acrylic spray paint, things went horribly wrong and the paint never dried.  I guess the chemical properties of the clay are inhibiting the paint from drying so I had to scrap this version of the donkey. Live and learn.

I was determined to get this project done, and in time for the trip to my parents house so I completely re-did the sculpture in Super Sculpey polymer clay.  Everything was going great until I baked the donkey.  When I opened the oven, the donkey had huge cracks all over the body.  Not something I wanted to see, especially after I had done a couple test runs with the polymer clay to figure out exact baking times depending on the thickness of the clay.  Once the polymer clay cooled Amy and I repaired the cracks with Epoxy and rubber bands.

Once the repairs were made to the structure of the donkey, I poured resin into the body of the donkey to add some strength and weight to the body.

The resin cured in 10 minutes but I let it settle overnight, then started priming and painting the sculpture.  I went with a Valspar textured stone painted.  The whole idea was for this to look like a stone garden sculpture, but I don't know that it will last outside after all the trials it has been through already.  I'll let my mom decide where it lives though, as this is for her.