OIL CLAY

Chavant® Le Beau Touche is the oil clay I prefer to use; it is popular clay among many makeup effects artists, including Mark Alfrey and Neill Gorton. It’s a firm clay, but it is easily warmed for malleability and takes texture stamps fairly easily without damaging the sculpt by pressing firmly into the clay surface. Oil clay can also be melted and poured or brushed, but I’ll talk more about that later. Artists use other clays; a listing of materials is included in the appendix at the back of this book. Le Beau Touche is not the firmest clay to work with, but it’s probably the firmest you will want to work with unless you are also involved in sculpting prototypes and models for props: armor, weapons, and the like. For that kind of work I suggest a material called Casteline, a wax-based clay that is very hard
(some say very difficult to work with, too); it’s available through The Compleat Sculptor. (See the appendix for contact information.) There are also numer­ous industrial design clays that are very hard and are ideal for carving, shaping, and styling extremely detailed models; some are even de-aired; entrapped air is removed, making the clay more dense, smoother, and great for achieving fine extrusions. Like the oil clays used by makeup effects designers, some of these clays can also be melted and poured or brushed into molds. Chavant® makes a very lightweight, hard sulfur free clay called Y2-Klay that is outstanding for sculpting extremely fine detail.