Holly's Creations in Clay: Wolf Sculpture Process

I am a HUGE nature geek. I am fascinated by animals of all shapes and sizes, but the wolf holds a special place in my heart.

So I just had to sculpt one.

This was my first attempt, and I think it turned out pretty good, but I would like to try again with my added experience and a different approach to technique.

Here's how I went about it....

As always, I recommend Premo! The photos are pretty self-explanatory, but I started with the head.

I continued to layer clay and fill it out to make it the right shape (I used a ton of photo references).

Once it looked about right, I etched in a few basic details and baked to preserve my work.

I then got to work on the rest of the body.

I began adding the body, and created the legs using aluminum foil.

As always, my clay gets extra filthy. I guess it doesn't really matter since I paint my pieces, but I do find it distracting. I may need to switch to gray so I don't notice it as much.

I skipped a few steps in pictures, but here is where I began work on the fur.

I experimented with different techniques until I finally settled on this. I wasn't 100% happy with it to be honest, but it looked alright.

I wet the fresh clay down with liquid sculpey and carved out the shapes with a curved sculpting tool.

The fur was a little to woolly and blocky for my taste, but I think it looked okay once the paint was on.

I decided to go with a less obvious choice for color. Silver and black makes for such a stunning mysterious color in a wolf, so that's what I went with.