Making Bugs

Making bugs, as a post title, probably amuses me more than most people. Throughout college I had several friends working as assistants in fly labs so they literally *made bugs*. This is the closest I’ll get.

I got a bead order in that required some canes I was out of – so I got down to that today. One of those canes was another cream butterfly. This cane was not big as far as butterfly canes run – it was about 3″ across by 3″ long. The slice on the side of the picture is the first slice after the part that sucked in and I had very little loss or distortion, so I’m thrilled.

The first time I made a very complex cane – a face – I followed a tutorial. To this DAY I still have many, many feet of that cane left and while it was alright, it wasn’t great. After that, I did a little planning before doing complex canes.

One thing I learned was that you need tiny amounts of clay to make the individual parts of most of the fancy canes. In this butterfly, for example, the entire body of the butterfly is 1/16th of a package of black clay. All of the wings and brown detailing in them is another 3 oz of clay *in total*. The rest is translucent and there is about 5oz of that.