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I’ve never really put my hands on sculpting, well I did a course in pottery wheel but that’s different, it was extremely fun, but beside that, I think the only time I play with clay and clay alikes was when I was a kid, sharks were my semi-daily subjects, I use to clump different colors of plasticine inside a big gray roll, shape the roll into a shark and with a knife cut it along the spinal cord and reveil the guts. I was probably influenced by some tv documentary, who knows, as long as it wasn’t on real creature I think it was ok, I guess.

I don’t even remember why I bought a pound or two of super sulpey but I can tell you that that thing it fantastic, I was laying on my desk one morning, I decided it was a good time to play with it, grabbed a lump of it and start kneading, after a couple of minute it felt like I was squeeshing the hell out of some sort of sea creature, from there I thougth that a sea creature like an octopus was the best candidate for a sculpture.

Octopus are quite interesting animals, possibly the most intelligent invertebrates, their camouflage expertise is outstanding, no creature can adapt itself to the surrounding like an actopus does, color and shape can change in a matter of seconds, really impressive, Always wanted to keep one of those cephalopods but the requirement for a salt water aquarium were too much so I desisted.

I quickly looked up for some reference photos on google, just not to miss any details, to make my life easier and enjoy this little sculpting experiment however I had to omit some protuberances that are characteristic of this invertebrate. The whole modeling session took a non stop 8 hours with the tiny suction cups taking a good 4 hours.

Did I mention that this thing was no bigger then 2 inches? Yeah, for some unkown reasons I kept it small, and that made it harder, when it came to add skin details I had no idea what tool I could use to inprint tiny little dots, wrinkels and grooves in a way that would be fast and easy, so I decided put the model aside for few minutes and think.

I molded a piece of sculpey into a mushrum like shape and pushed the wider side against a piece of cork I found in the backyard, I repeat this step with few more pieces until I had a variery of texture stamps. To properly use this stamps super sculpey need to be baked, in fact it’s a polymer that hardens if baked at low temps in your kitchen oven.

Back on the model, with the help of the freshly made utensil I start punching gently all over the octopus, I was satisfied with the look of the skin, once the entire model was skinned, I set all its arm in place, the posture we see here is the typical aggressive/defensive position they aquire when intimidated by a potential danger, usually the last thing a predator see is a cloud of dark ink while the octopus propels away. The octopus expelles in the water this dark liquid commonly known as ink, a good strategy to cover his ass and disappear as quick as possible.

I’m a short person and my hands are somehow small, still in proportion with the rest of the body hopefully, so in this picture you can see the size of the model, it would be fan to see in the hand of someone I knew, 6.8 feet tall, huge hands, huge dude! After i was done with my positive sculpey experiance I was supposed to bake the model in order to preserve its integrity, baking super sculpey seems to be tricky for the newbie, too hot and it will crack, too low and the inside will not harden… since it was my first attempt with this polymer and absolutely no experiance with baking this material I left it aside, promising miself to look up on the net for some tips on how to bake super sculpey. Well don’t ask what happened to it, I wont answer!

Too bad I haven’t done anything else with those 2 pound of sculpey I had, maybe one day I will pick up another lump of it and se what comes out.