Making a Sculpture with Foam Clay

While working on my dragon bust sculpture, I had a few photos taken of the process. I’ve put them together in a compilation so you can see how it all came together, and learn a few tips and tricks.

The material I’m using here is called Foam Clay, provided by Lumin’s Workshop. Fresh from the pail it’s a sticky, soft material that forms strings when pulled. You mould it into your desired shape, and once it cures it hardens and forms into a high density, closed cell foam. After it fully cures in 48 hours it can be sanded, carved, and painted like regular foam. It also cures to 1/3 its original weight so it’s a very light material.

I love it because of its versatility. It’s easy to texture before and after curing, seals well, and even though it becomes unworkable after about 15 minutes you can always remove chunks you don’t like and infill, which is something you can’t do easily with, say, air-drying clay. You don’t need an oven either, so that removes a major and risky step in the curing process.

I hope you like this step-by-step tutorial, and if you have any questions please feel free to ask. So without further ado, let’s get sculpting.

I started with an aluminum wire armature, using hot glue to attach it to a cardboard base. I didn’t worry too much about the exact posture for now. The great thing about wire is that it’s adjustable and forgiving, so I could change the posing later.

Using hot glue and aluminum foil, I filled out the body and head into the desired thickness and shape. This greatly reduces the amount of foam clay I end up using, and I end up saving quite a bit on material as a result. You want to block out only the biggest shapes at this phase, and build up from there.

Using foam clay, I start forming more the distinct shapes of the body and head, such as the mouth, cheeks and eye sockets. The foam clay is workable for about 10 to 15 minutes. It’s perfectly okay to have seams as you work on different parts of your sculpture at this stage, as the detailing will add to this base and cover underlying seams where you worked on two parts of the sculpture at different times. If you want a completely smooth surface however, a gentle pass with fine grained sandpaper will remove your seams.

Small pieces of shaped clay become the scales, horns and nostrils. I used two different colours of foam to make the eyes and teeth easier to make out.

A small etching tool brushed lightly against the cured foam surface creates grooves and dents that add realism to the finished piece. A fingernail also works! Don’t etch too hard or you will pierce the foam rather than shape it.

Large clumps of foam pressed down at different angles with a fingernail makes great hair. I used small tendrils of white foam at the edges of the mane, curling them to make the mane flowing and dynamic. A note on detail: let hair come out a bit past raised areas like horns. It makes the hair look more voluminous this way.

The nice thing about using two different kinds of foam is that it’s easy to tell different elements of the body apart. In this sculpture, it makes the spines visible through the white swirls of hair.

There are different kids of scales – compare crocodile scales to a python’s, for example. Mixing large plates with a pebble-like hide adds visual interest to the body. Here, the plates were added on rather than carved out. The smaller scales are round pieces of foam pressed onto the base body.

The foam has been sealed with two coats of black plastidip, which doubles as a primer. You can also use flexbond or another sealing coat. The sheen cures from a gloss to a satin finish. I noticed that foam clay has a dense, non-porous surface so a pass with a heat gun to close pores wasn’t necessary.

The primed foam is painted using Golden acrylic paints. The dragon I’m sculpting has an oily sheen to his scales so I used red, gold, blue and green interference paints to replicate this metallic, iridescent effect. Whichever way you turn this sculpture, it shimmers with a rainbow of colours. The hair, eyes, teeth and base were also finished with Golden paints. Lastly, I mounted this sculpture on a stained and finished wood block.