Okay. So at this point I have a sweet Sailor Moon wine glass and an amazing set of Mario themed glasses. Now I'm getting into it. I'm loving working with the clay and it's probably one of my least expensive crafts I've ever picked up and I have so many other fandoms I'd love themed wine glasses for and I don't think I can stop.
So. What's the next fandom? Well, Legend of Zelda of course. And what's the new idea? A wine glass that looks like the hilt of the Master Sword. Genius. I love it. God, that's a lot of details and much more involved than the others. Are you sure? Do you have any other Zelda ideas? No? Master sword it is.
This time I do have progress pictures.
I did some research first, I had to decide which Master Sword I wanted. They're all similar of course, but there are some differences. Ocarina of Time is my game, but the sword in that one is kind of plain. So I went with a some what simplified Skyward Sword version. Sort of a merging of OOT and SS you could say.
So I started by wrapping the stem in a thick layer of aluminum foil to give myself a thicker handle, more like a sword hilt, and I wrapped some wire around the top of the stem and had it extend outward as a support base for the wing like hand guards. I was really excited when I found the idea to use foil like that, I wanted a good thick handle but definitely did not want to use the amount of clay it would take to do that.
This glass went much more slowly than my others, they were all single sittings, this one was in several stages over days.
The next stage was blending my custom color for the shade of blue I wanted, and then starting to cover things. I was using Kato Polyclay brand clay, and I mixed 1 oz of their blue with a quarter of an ounce of black and a quarter of an ounce of silver. It gave me a nice slightly shimmery metallic dark blue.
I covered the base, handle and about a quarter of the bottom of the glass with this blue. For the wings, I basically rolled several snakes in various lengths and arranged them using the Skyward Sword picture for reference. In the future if I did this again I think I would use a clay extruder with a square shape and arrange them at an angle, point to point, for a more rigid angled shape, but I'm not unhappy with how this looks. I do sort of feel like I could do better though.
If the colors seem super saturated in that picture, it's because they are. I had really bad lighting in this photo so I did some quick editing to bring up the contrast so you could actually see the shapes.
After this it was mostly details, green straps around the handle, custom mixed color the same as the blue but with green instead, bands around the top and bottom of the handle, adding points on each side up from the hand guards with gold squares at the tip, the big gold jewel right in the middle, and of course, the Triforce front and center of everything. I had thought about doing a Hyrule Crest instead of just the Triforce, but I wasn't sure I could do it small enough in the available space and have it look good.
After that it was just baking and glazing, like usual. I tell you what, that bitch takes up some serious space on the shelf with those wings. I do think I could do better, but I am not at all unhappy with the result, especially for something with this many details combined with my relative lack of clay experience.
So, I'm still having a great time with this. Although I have learned using nicer firmer brands of clay leads to bruised palms, which was a new experience for me. I want more wine glasses. Of course I want a Final Fantasy themed one, but I can't come up with anything brilliant. I'd love to do more Mario glasses but I can't come up with any ideas that would really work on a regular wine glass. Boos, mushrooms, goombas, all would be awkward to build. Cari makes a joke about Boos to hold her booze and it gives me a powerful desire for this but I still don't have a good solution for this, it needs to be a very round glass to get the right shape and that's hard to find.
And then one day, I was at the dollar store with Shannon.
And we go through the fake flowers and whatnot section. There's a bunch of vases. And among the vases is a perfect bubble shaped container that is the most perfect glass I could have imagined to be a perfect little stemless Boo wine glass. I couldn't believe it. I mean, sure, it's technically a vase, but that doesn't mean it won't hold wine. I immediately buy three. One for me, one for Cari, since the booze joke was hers, and one for Rachel, because for just ages and ages Rachel's text message sound has been a Boo laugh on my phone.
I bought a giant brick of white clay, I had been gradually building a stockpile of clay colors so I didn't need anything else. Unfortunately, once again, I have no progress pictures. So here's the description.
(Also, just assume I'm doing all of these things three times, I worked on the three glasses simultaneously rather than making one and going to the next.)
First, I covered the entire glass with white clay. The whole damn thing. Next I made cones of foil with the ends turned up to look like Boo tails, and covered them in clay and attached them to the glasses. (You'll see pictures of this soon, you'll understand why in a minute) I made smaller cones for boo arms and attached them, turning up the ends a bit. I sketched the face out on a piece of paper to make sure I made it the right size for the glass. I had intended to do three dimensional tongues sticking out, but it just didn't look right so I made them flat instead. Added teeth, eyes, eyebrows, the whole thing. And this is how they turned out:
God, the lighting in my kitchen is so bad for taking pictures of these. I need to find a new place for pictures.
I love them so much. Cari and Rachel had no idea they were coming, so that was a fun surprise. And of course as soon as Cari has her Boo, she insisted she needed a shy faced Boo so she could have the set. I had no problem with this. So I went out, bought three more glasses and another brick of clay.
This time, I do have progress pictures.
So, same beginning steps. Cover the whole glass in clay. Make little foil cones and cover in clay. Attach. You'll notice there are bits of clay scattered around the foil cones, that is to fill in various dips and divots. I learned with the foil handle of my Zelda glass that (naturally) the clay forms to the unevenness of the foil and creates a rather bumpy surface that can be filled and smoothed from the outside, but is much easier to just avoid in the first place.
After this I made a custom pink blend, I'm afraid I don't have any idea what the proportions were, I just added tiny bits of red until it looked right to me. I rolled them out into very thin ovals and smoothed them on to the area where the face would be.
The regular Boo in the background was there for reference... and also to hold my wine.
The eyes and mouth were very simple, just little black segments of clay arranged in vaguely down turned curves.
The arms were a little bigger and thicker than on the original Boos, since I needed these ones to be partially hiding the face. I played with the shape until I liked it, then attached them.
I baked them, and then I spent an amazing amount of time trying to get the blush lines on his face just right. Those are hand painted on and were an absolute bitch to get looking right. Stu helped me, offering opinions and suggestions until it was right. They came out ridiculously adorable. And now all three of us have matching Boo sets!
I realize I have far more wine glasses than I need but I'm not sorry. I also have a blue, purple, and yellow wine glass all without specifically defined projects but the intention is to do something fun and clay related with them. I also have two other glasses I painted with glass paint, one is green with the intention of sculpting a tree around it, and one is red with the intention of attempting to make it look like Sailor Moon's Cutie Moon Rod. That's probably the next clay project. I tried to just buy a red wine glass for that but I had a great deal of trouble finding what I wanted. I found a set of red ones on eBay that had kind of an iridescent orange color too, but that was fine. They also had cool twisty stems and were made out of real crystal. The problem with using them for this Sailor Moon glass is that when I pulled them out of the box when they arrived, their beauty was absolutely breathtaking and I knew I could never alter them in any way, they were perfect exactly the way they were. Plus, they were crystal, which means that if you wet your finger and run it along the rim they sing. Clay would ruin that. So I just bought glass paint and painted a dollar store glass, it works just as well.
Okay. So, I do have one more thing I made, but I'm tired of typing, so that's another post I think.
