Fictitious marsupial creature with hair

The creature I've been working on has changed yet again after I spent last night punching hair into it. The hair has added another element to this fictitious marsupial and has made the creature seem a little more real: being somewhere between a blind mole-rat, weasel and possum. The intent was to create a fictional carnivourous burrowing marsupial, which I could later use in a photoshoot.











I learned a a number of things from making this small creature:

Chavant clay for smaller parts is useful as it is harder and retains its shape, but is harder to get detail and texture into.

Smaller creatures are not necessarily easier to make: they become more fiddly to sculpt, more difficult to make moulds than larger pieces, tricker to place pour holes in moulds and are challenging to assemble.

I learned how to create mechanical bonds between silicone and other substances.

After seaming mould lines the silicone can be smoothed with IPA and then a dulling agent can be brushed over the surface when the silicone has cured. I still have some way to go with seaming but I improved with this piece somewhat.

Hand painting silicone pieces can achieve some effects but I need to learn how to airbrush with thinned down silicone paints.

I could have made this creature with a solid silicone core rather than a jelly wax core. I also could have run another two batches of silicone down the mould lines when sealing the two halves, as this could have been a little thicker. A solid silicone core would have negated this problem entirely.

Hair punching takes time and patience.

Making creatures takes time. In many ways because this was small with lots of moulds it probably took a similar amount of time as what it would take to make something much larger.