Foam Clay - How to Sculpt, Cast, Carve, & Paint!

ya got me that phone clay I've been hearing about oh of course Thanks these are bottle caps hey there fellow maker welcome to this shop we've got a special guest today and a special material that's right guys Steve from SKS props and today I've got foam clay your own foam clay that's right you can actually pick this up over at SKS props dot-com for purchase yeah and a bunch of other really fantastic cosplay materials that is correct today we're gonna dive into this material now I've been seeing the Internet the cosplay community all over foaming-at-the-mouth for more stuff with Colt home clank and i haven't really had a chance to dive into it so today what are we gonna do Steve well foam clay is an extremely versatile material and we're going to be using it in some push molds and doing some sculpting and showing you guys kind of what it does laughing well I'm excited to dive in and get my hands dirty let's get started so one of the first things that we're going to do is use some foam clay and push molds push molds are great because you can pick up a lot of detail and this type of material does pick up a lot of detail as long as you're using it properly now the only thing is with the push molds when you put it in here you are gonna need to put it into a freezer or something for about 24 hours so that it can solidify a little bit so that when you do D mold it you are not distorting it so let's jump into that foam clay itself is a non-toxic air drying clay and the thing that's really really cool about this is that it's extremely malleable and when you get it out of there you actually do want to stretch it out and kind of get some elasticity to it and that will actually help you pick up a lot more of the details that are in these molds now this is a little horn that I had sculpted earlier and so we're just going to see if it can pick up all these little details and one thing I've really found out with the molds that's good to do is not to press all of it in at once you actually want to kind of layer it and what that will do is minimize the amount of air bubbles that are in the surface now you're just filling that up to the top correct I'm just gonna fill this one all the way up it should help with the D molding process all right I think that one will be all good so at this point it's all in there but you can see that it has a lot of give to it so we're gonna put this in the freezer for 24 hours so that the clay will help solidify the other molds that we have bill has some here that have an extremely glossy surface so we're gonna see what kind of a surface detail we can get we've got one with a woodgrain one with some stone pebble work and then some nuts and bolts now the thing that's also really great about foam clay for details is that it's extremely lightweight so you can glue this stuff to any of the other EBA foam products that you have for this one we're actually not going to fill it up I just want to press it in here to show you the level of detail that it's able to pick up from this wood texture so you can see all the little wood grain textures that are built into this mold came right out of that clay and again if you were to let that sit and air dry all of those would just be built into it this one is going to be the gloss surface that's on the inside there and just want to see how well it picks that up once it fully cures I think it's probably good enough for that one very good and last one we're gonna try this Skyrim ring the great thing about this stuff too is if you notice I'm not using gloves or anything again this is a non-toxic material so don't be afraid to use it in your home you know and it's just like when you're doing like a silicone into any of these to this first layer you're putting in as kind of the print layer and then you can kind of backfill it and not be quite as careful just to fill it up and once it solidifies it'll actually have the consistency of Evie a foam and we can sound that flat on a belt sander all right now it's time to throw these in the freezer so that they'll set up for this example I'm going to try to replicate you know the same basic horn that I did for the push mold but if I didn't have enough time to do a push mold and then wait for that one to dry and then make another one we're going to make a basic spike then just use some drilling techniques to sculpt it out and with this won't really come down to is you can use like silicon tips work great on this you want to make sure to wet them and you can press into the clay now because the clay is kind of a spongy material it will actually bounce back some if you want a deeper crevice in there you want to push harder than what you would think now for this example I'm just gonna be putting a couple of these in primarily most of the detail I'm going to do I'm going to do after it dries with a rotary tool so at this point I think I'm just gonna let it air dry and tomorrow I'll go in with some sanding sponges and rotary tool to see how close I can get it to my original sculpt once you're done using this product the biggest thing to make sure is that you reseal your bag because it is an air dry it can actually mess with what's left in here so I got enough for that the rest of it goes back in the tub and you know what's great about this is once you're done you have a cool tub leftover it's tomorrow and we just pull these out of the freezer and we're ready to demote them alright so we've got a little bolt here and yeah these are they're still cold but they they have not fully cured yet so after it comes out you just put them in the freezer to help it kind of solidify and then you still want to let it rest for about another 24 hours just to completely cure okay oh detail oh that came out great did that I can see some tiny little surface bubbles but if I was making like a post-apocalyptic thing that would be totally cool well that and I was pressing them in there pretty quick I mean if you were more diligent about really pressing the clay in there and minimizing those surface bubbles you know it'd be good awesome I want to be mold this one I'm curious to see how shiny it's stayed all right it's kind of shiny you can definitely see how putting multiple pieces in and how tricky it could be to keep from getting those bubbles but the surface finish is quite shiny it's definitely not Li gloss that we got out of the mold you're telling me before the stuff shrinks a little bit yeah it'll shrink about 15% okay so that may account for the change in surface quality we also have to let these dry fully maybe tomorrow we'll take a peek inside look yeah the mold a couple more I'm excited about this one this one had a lot of surface texture on it that is really cool okay now the really cool one sculpted a little horn out of monster clay and we did a really quick mold and it did a pretty good job picking up a lot of those little details yeah again it's not it's not resin you know it's not a liquid so you're forcing it in there but for a clay product yes so that's pretty impressive now you sculpted one yesterday and that is dried correct you did try to put a lot of surface detail into this but you can see how when you use a mold you're able to capture a lot more than that right and once this one fully cures I'd like to go in with a rotary tool and bring out a lot more of the details because I think that sanding them afterwards you can get a lot of really good structure that way as well try that in a little bit but now we're gonna try doing some sculpting on another piece of foam this handsome gentleman is gonna help us out I made a quick pattern out of duct tape to make a domino mask flipped it over to make the other side and crank that out of foam it's just four millimeter foam I put some duct tape or no what is this 217 double-sided tape thanks Steve on there so we can stick it to his face and hopefully hopefully sculpt some stuff on there so I started with this foam base because I figured that would be more cost effective use of materials you could probably just sculpt the whole thing on a foam clay but if you're doing something something really gigantic like armor basing it in a sheet of EBA foam and then doing the detail in your clay I think you're probably more costume yeah definitely I think that structurally as well I mean you've got a nice good base for this to go on so what do we do we just start pressing playing in her the first thing that I would point out is that they recommend to put water on the phone that you are using it helps the foam clay hear a little bit better same thing with any of the tools or your hands I would recommend to wet them and then that will help smooth the clay out now the the big thing to note when you're doing this is once again this doesn't have to be the finished surface I would still always recommend to go back in in the end of it and sand it down mm-hmm which so we'll plan on that because we're gonna have to sculpt it on here and then I'll let it dry overnight like we did before just grab a piece and kind of do that yeah kind of knead it out it's like taffy yeah you can tell how it really gets a lot more elasticity once you knead it a little bit yeah so it's got a little bit of like a greasy feel in there and once you work it a little bit that seems to go away one of the other nice things about having this form is I can use the edge of it to kind of guide my sculpt so I have this boundary I can I can work with it's like a paint by numbers but for sculpting so I'm just trying to get like a base layer down that I can hopefully then refine but I'm just making sure that I press it into the surface hopefully it sticks best that way right yeah and I don't really have any idea of what sort of design I'm gonna go for but since you mentioned will will plan on using a rotary tool after if the edges are kind of like like this a little bit here I might not worry about that so we can just still just cut that off later and cool so I'm more focusing on just getting some material like bulking up areas where I want to be more detailed right like maybe I'll make a spike here and a spike here so I can start to kind of rough those out yeah once again if it gets a little too dry then just put a little water on your finger or on your tool and smooth it out Steve said did some test pieces yesterday to kind of see what kind of detail you can get using some of these tools and I'm actually really impressed by how much detail this little stylus got in there so we may want to see if we can add some that to this build [Laughter] you know we know that'll happen that's great though if you were to make pieces beforehand that you've already got little squiggles and stuff you know that that is actually going to adhere to thick what's down already yeah that's good to go you're right I'm glad I did that on purpose to showcase right and I'm gonna bother like trying to no boy in there I'll just uh Dremel that all off later while I'm working out my mask there I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons for all the wonderful support it's because of you and your dollars that we can afford to have this wonderful workshop and employees to help make more videos if you'd like to jump in on the fun get access to behind-the-scenes vlogs extra credit videos for our builds including this one and early release on our new build videos and you can head on over to patreon accomplish props consider tossing us a dollar it helps out a ton and you can get some really cool extra stuff thanks for the support let's get back to sculpting some foam clay another type of tool that I really use with this stuff are the silicone tip tools because they have a little bit of give it doesn't pull the clay near as bad you still want to wet them but you can see where it really does a good job just kind of rounding over a lot of those edges and I was going in with a knife and this stuff doesn't cut really well like if you're used to using monster clay this is gonna be a lot different it pulls a bit now if you wait 20 minutes though yeah then that's where you can start going in with your knife and really defining a lot of those edges yeah kind of like epoxy sculpt like you can sculpt it at different times and the harder it gets you can do different things to it when you're not using your clay because it's air dry make sure that you're at least like kind of pressing that down to keep that top surface dry in a sense I even kind of noticed a piece that was sitting out for like 10 minutes I was working from got a little bit stiff yeah it'll start to develop a skin in about 10 minutes which you can kind of rehydrate at that point just by taking water and putting it back on the surface no that's good once it's fully dried though can you rehydrate or is it pretty much done now at that point it's pretty much that okay that's good to know I've got kind of the base sculpt done and I think I'm done with my place I'm gonna close it up and Steve said I should make sure I get all the air out so that's a good good call Steve I'm going to close it almost all the way press as much air out as I can and then finish it I think I'm gonna let it dry now you could go in and sculpt more deep but I'm not very good at that I'm gonna count on using by the dremel tool also I took like 20 minutes to sculpt this and it seems like it's kind of skinning yeah if you're going to do any of the like little bitty details like with the the silicone tools or with the little metal tools it's something you want to do kind of in the beginning because once it starts to skin over it'll bounce back yeah so I'm just gonna let this try I'm fairly pleased with that result and then tomorrow we'll work on some more detail here's one of the parts we've pulled out of the mold it's been like six or seven hours yeah we'd let it dry a little bit longer but we want to test how well it will resist water or if it will absorb more water once it's come out of the mold exactly so we want to put it in a cup of water overnight see how it does there's a problem though it'll probably float it will float okay so instead I got a washer I mean wood glue it to that hopefully that that sends it down there got a little accelerant I'll put on my wash right there and we'll stick it down stuck in place great and in you go thanks for the assist Steve we're gonna leave that overnight see what happens to it [Music] [Music] why is it foamy there's some sort of like putting skin on the top why I predict that the only thing I'm gonna find at the bottom of this is a washer he's the the leftover washer it's been here overnight about 12 hours submerged completely submerged and I don't feel anything down there the water is very dark it's like congealed yeah re-solidified on the surface mm-hmm so it looked like that when we started and I'm gonna pour this off and we'll see what's left so we've got murky gray water and it's slowly the glue goo is slowly going in there and a wash so this had about seven hours out of the mold to dry yeah and then we put it in water the whole thing melted that's a very good thing to know about Punk well that did just goes to show you do not take your prop and submerge it in water very good lesson good lessons hey why don't we see how that summer things turned out all these pieces have had a couple of days to dry and the thinner stuff like this and some of these little guys feel like they're completely dry yeah the horns that we made the outside skin is fine I think the middle of it might still be a little spongy but another day or two and I think those would be okay as well but we should even though it's fun to be good we should still be able to do some work yeah we're gonna try to do some rotary tool and there get some texture on it yeah and then we'll throw some paint on these things and see how they look another quick side note this piece came out of a mold that was perfectly glossy but you can see the finish while it is very smooth is no longer glossy my guess is that because the stuff shrinks a little bit that as it shrunk the outer skin probably just got a tiny bit wrinkled and was no longer shiny that's my guess anyway the question was brought up if we were to slice this like an Eevee a foam would it actually open up so we're gonna check that out no effect I'm gonna peel my mask off the face there we go and we can do a little bit of work on this out-of-the-way jerk mostly what I want to do is clean up these edges so I got my rotary tool right here ready to go and then I think I want to add a little bit of texture to it [Music] [Music] I've got a bunch of different grinding bits on my rotary tool here and I'm just playing with some texture trying to figure out the best way to add a little bit of texture and kind of beating it up a little bit but I am learning I wanted to add more of kind of like a like a hammered metal texture but I don't have a lot of material to work with here's I don't want to punch all the way through it but if the cleanup work went really well this stuff sands very very well which is nice I'm just trying to toe the line between getting a little bit of a divot and drilling a hole all the way through it so I just have this grinding bit and I'm kind of doing little little circles and just trying to make it look a little bit more textured so I'm going to do a little bit more of that and then we'll throw some paint on this thing is he how it looks [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so here the two horns that we have been working on this one was again pushed into a mold and this one was sculpted by hands separate but then I went in with a rotary tool to add in additional detail lines to it so at this point I'm actually going to go in with the rotary tool and sand it so that they look very similar [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this has been an educational couple of days working with a new material and I gotta tell ya there are a handful of use cases where this stuff really shines I finished up my mask here I did some dremel to add a little bit of texture it didn't go quite the way I thought I think just a little bit more practice in picking the right bits would help but the thing that blew me away the most about this is the areas that I sculpted by hand and used water to smooth with my fingers those areas are perfectly perfectly smooth there's no fuzzy bits I did a couple coats of this stuff here peel coat similar to Plasti Dip and it looked like black rubber it looked like yeah man I really did and then I just did a couple of layers of just airbrushing some acrylic paints on here and I'm pretty happy with these results making a foam evie a foam base for it for me to sculpt on meant I didn't have to worry about symmetry or anything I think it worked out really well and I could definitely see a lot of cases where I would use the foam clay like this to get a similar result yeah I can definitely see applications for this where you're using it as smaller detail pieces on your props themselves but also like we're messing around with these horns like this would be perfect for you know like an application to your face I mean the extremely lightweight you just need to use some spirit gum stick them right on there I mean these things are pretty awesome absolutely I could even use the same thing to stick this domino mask on or put a cord around it the light weighted 'no siz a massive bonus if you were to cast these out of a hard plastic they'd be quite a bit heavier its build from the future one week after filming the original stuff we left all this stuff to dry and we're gonna test a couple of things first I'm gonna try and Bend these parts here see how flexible they are now that they have had a full week to dry let's give it a go this way oh that became actually quite brittle it bent a bit before it snapped but it did break something worth keeping in mind we'll try this thin guy here if we get similar results yeah so yeah quite a bit of flex in there but it will snap remember this isn't evey a foam this is something different not exactly sure what it but it's important to know and expect that you're not going to get the same amount of flexibility out of this stuff as you will with say a strip of EBA foam it also seems like it is shrunk quite a bit there's you can see it kind of indenting there this little piece here there's a bit of an indent as it's shrunk in on itself it's still the surface still looks really really nice these horns that Steve sculpted and cast and he cast one of them and sculpted the other Paige actually wore these in our Emerald City Comic Con they looked amazing you can also see though that it is dished in the back where it has started to shrink the shine on there is the adhesive we used to stick this to Paige's face so that that's what you can expect with a piece like that here's the mask I made backed with sheets of EBA foam the surface still looks really really nice let's see how flexible it is that's got quite a bit of flex the layer of foam that I put on there was quite thin and the EBA foam is still quite flexible so as a reusable mask I think this is a this is a really great application for the foam clay I think once it gets thicker like maybe this piece right here you may have a chance of it cracking but this should Bend and stick to my face no problem if I put a little medical adhesive on the back of it I like this one a lot the horns especially being quite stout they're not going to break on you and they are very lightweight and still plenty squishy so as like a reusable facial prosthetic the foam clay is a fantastic use case and then finally another one of these once it had a week to dry we dropped it in water and we're gonna find out if it's still dissolved and I have a hunch it did because there's still this weird jello skin on the top of the water quite a lot of material coming out of there and I don't see oh this is like the lucky charm marshmallow a foam clay that's left it almost completely dissolved we put this in the water last night and it almost completely dissolved now it didn't stand up a lot better to the one that we tried when it was fresh but I think it's probably a really good idea that you don't get your foam clay pieces wet at least seal them with something that makes them waterproof okay back to bill from the past very educational and that tub that you brought I hang on that I think I'll let you have that one bill and of course if you would like to get your hands on some of this stuff Steve's got a website for you have you guys can find that and several other products over at SKS props dot-com that's right now we only tackle a couple of small example projects here but I'm sure you've got tons of ideas for what this could be used for and please share those ideas with us down in the comments we'll be sure to read all those comments and I'll probably use some of this stuff in an upcoming project or two wonderful stuff non-toxic thank you again so much for sharing with us Steve no problem at all thank you for having me in the shop you know I'm really excited to see what a lot of people do with yes me too thank you for watching and of course thanks to our patrons for helping support what we do here over at patreon.com slash punish props if you'd like to help out a bit and get some extra content for yourself that'll do it for us this week we'll see you in the next belt I just want to see how well it picks up the texture of and something finally I don't know got a real tight shot of your gross fingernails Oh No

Channel: Punished Props Academy

Views: 326,595

Keywords: Foam clay, foam, HD Foam, SKS Props, foamsmith, Cosplay, props, tutorial, how to use foam clay, sculpting foam clay, casting foam clay, dremel, rotary tool, texturing foam, foam clay mask, how to, how to make, do it yourself, prop making, bill doran, punished props, punished props academy, cosplay tutorial, Foam clay techniques, foam clay experiments, foam clay tutorial, foam clay press mold, press mold, foam clay details, chinbeard, DIY, foam clay ideas

Id: 8kM8IGONYCM

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019