1st Cake Topper

Thanks to Howard, a random fellow artist I met in LA, I got a chance to experiment with a new medium - Sculpey (or Polymer) clay. This stuff ROCKS my SOCKS! It never dries out and bakes perfectly (without a kiln!)

So, I was sitting at home staring at this clay that Howard gave me as a gift (two days before I had to head down to Haemin and Howard's (different Howard) wedding in LA). Suddenly, I came up with an idea to make a cake topper as a gift for the happy couple. Since I was handling all the flowers, including floral decoration of the cake, at the wedding, I knew they didn't have a cake topper yet. So, I thought I'd give it a shot, and if worse comes to worst, I could just place it on their table as a standing figurine. The end result was more than I ever imagined! The picture above is before I fully finished it, but it was such a nice shot (courtesy of Daniel Lee), I had to put it in.

I had never really sculpted before, so the whole process was an adventure! It was fun coming up with alternative methods, especially when I didn't have the right tools. Like, at one point, I was smacking the clay with a wooden rice spatula I found to flatten it out. My brother looks over and says "Heyy... that's my spatula. I got it as a gift." And, I laughed and said, "Heyy.. thanks!" as I proceeded to slap the clay.






















This was one of my absolute favorite details. I wanted the shoes to have texture similar to real shoes, so I ran over to the pile of shoes in our apartment, found a pair of my brother's actual converse, and rolled it over the clay to make the treads for the clay converse. It worked great!














Here, I was fooling around with different hairstyles for Howard before actually making his hair. It was quite entertaining.

This was the quick sketch I did before starting the models. I started with the idea on the left, then changed it because the faces looked too flat and expressionless. I also didn't want to make arms, so I was initially going to make them arm-less figurines.








For a final touch, I called up my friend, Jiun, who can create custom-made earrings, and asked her to make a pair of earrings for the figurine. I left her ears pierced so that it might be easier for Jiun to get the earrings through.

Unfortunately, it ended up being much more difficult than I had anticipated because of the fragile nature of the doll. Jiun sat for 6 hours just trying to thread and build the earrings. 6 hours!!! She did an amazing job!

My picture below sucks because the earrings themselves are out of focus.


Here is a final shot of the bride and groom, and the cake topper. Do you see the likeness?

It was eery how much they looked alike, considering I had only a vague idea of what their dress and hair was going to look like.













Here's the gift, all wrapped pretty and ready to be opened!



















Finally, here is the teary-eyed bride that made all the work worth it.