Thursday, March 26, 2020

How to Sculpt Miniature Cookies

         People seem really into tutorial posts so I figured I would do another one. Since I have a reasonable amount of photos to demonstrate what I am talking about. Today we are going to talk about how to sculpt chocolate chip cookies. You can sort of do these in any size you want, but I made GIANT cookies. Well, giant for 1/9 scale. I wanted to make big cookies for part of the fair food I will offer this Saturday at my live sale. I happen to think that giant cookies are a perfect fair food.
       I didn't take a picture of my tools, because I wasn't planning a tutorial. So basically you need to mix up clay into a light dough color. What I have here is white, translucent, and a tiny dab of yellow. Mix and mix and mix until it is a uniform color. If it is too yellow you can add more white and translucent. This color clay is good for SO many types of baked goods. The translucent clay makes it look more realistic when it is bakes and not super chalky. 
      You will also need to prebake a long snake (or several short ones) of chocolate colored clay. It doesn't necessarily need to be baked completely, just for a few minutes. you need to chop it up into tiny pieces. Chips or chunks, it doesn't matter too much. 
    The next steps is to mix the pre-baked chips into the dough. You can also skip this step if you want and just add some chips to the top of the cookies. But this is how you make real chocolate chip cookies, so this is how I like to make my polymer clay cookies. 

      Next you want to get the basic size of your cookies. What I do is take a small piece of the clay mixture and roll it into a tiny ball and smooth it into a flat cookie shape. If it looks about right I will roll it back up and make more little balls of clay in the same size. Then I squish them all flat. 
      After my cookies are flat I start to do the texture on them. For texture I use an old toothbrush and a bit of balled up aluminum foil. For the bottoms of the cookies I use just toothbrush texture, for the tops I use both the toothbrush and the balled up foil. Then I take a needle tool (which is literally a needle that I put on a handle of clay) and I will dig out the chocolate chips that are close to the surface a bit. If you didn't mix them into the dough, this would be when you could add them to the top and push them in a bit. 
     This is the step that I really wish I had more photos of. To make the cookies looked baked like this (they are still uncooked polymer clay in this photo) you take a few colors of pastel and add it to the cookies in layers. You need a dull yellow color (not bright, closer to a buckskin), an orangeish shade, again sort of brown orange would be good. And a reddish brown. Start with a dusting of the yellow, not totally covering the surface. Then work on some of the orange, but adding it more around the edges and a light dusting in the middle. The last use the dark reddish brown, but very lightly. Once you get into this you will actually get a good feel for how much to add of each color. 
      And that's it really. Bake them according to the package direction and then add a layer of gloss or matte finish (I use brush on for these) and coat the surface to protect the pastels. They are actually really easy to make. With some very similar skills you could also make bread, rolls and a variety of other baked goods. I hope someone finds this interesting and useful :) 

1 comment:

Jo-Anne Baker said...

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