I finally finished this terrifying goat foot candlestick!

I started it in 2015, at our first apartment in Berlin.

I had seen something similar on some luxury housewares or design website, and I was like, I can make that! Plus, it’ll be great sculpting practice!

It’s built on a tall narrow glass caper jar, the lid of the caper jar, tin foil and wooden rings from the craft store.

It was months before our stuff arrived in the shipping container, so I used what was around!

Once I had built the base, I had to cover it with fur.

Each row of fur tufts has to harden before the next one can be sculpted (unless you want to be really careful, and I never manage to be careful enough; I always wind up squishing what I just laboriously sculpted).  So each time I worked on a project that used epoxy clay, I would save a little bit at the end to add a row of fur tufts. There are roughly fourteen rows, so that’s a lot of projects!

Once I added the last row of fur last night, I started a new project.

I bought this rococo mirror* made of some weightless extruded foam plastic during my art supply mission on Saturday.

I used a glue gun to quickly affix the bugs and flowers and fill in any space between them and the frame. Then I did a first pass with epoxy clay.

I used it to reinforce the attachment of little legs (it’s very strong) and sculpt new curlicues to incorporate the bug shapes.

When we get a warm sunny day I’ll hit the whole thing with white primer for plastic (which I finally found here, in the excellent DupliColor brand) so I have a uniform surface and can add detail better. Then add paint and Swarovski crystals!

Done with that, I hauled out all my other sculpture projects from 2015 and started finishing them up!

One of the wonderful things about epoxy clay is that you can apply it directly over practically anything, including baked polymer clay, like the mantis.

You can read about the start of the mantis here, and you can read in great detail about my experience beginning to sculpt and learning to use epoxy clay here.

It’s so much easier to work on the hair of my Diana bust now that I’ve had all this experience making fur!

I’ll keep you guys posted on the process of all these projects, unless I get derailed by some new obsession and they go back in the queue!

While I was painting the goat foot with many layers of metallic paints, I mixed up too much blackened gold-umber-bronze.

When the only tool you have is a brush full of bronze paint, everything looks like it needs to be painted bronze. I changed the zombie hand I resculpted at Halloween from glitter black to bronze and FINALLY dry-brushed highlights onto the ram’s horn mirror I bought for our hallway before we left the US. Always be finishing!

*You can see the reflection of one of Daria’s drawings in the mirror, from one of our earliest art trades.