One Twelfth Scale Cheetah

A bit of a Work in Progress slideshow

It must be said that any dollshouse pets that I make do tend towards the exotic. I have made several 'Kensington Cheetahs' in the past and have always had issues with the build/texture/paint process, let's just say that trying to texture the whole piece in one go has never been an enormous success.

This time I 'invented' a new process to try and keep everything under control.

First a wire armature is covered with polymer clay and modelled to make a lightly undersized/skinny cheetah. Once fired any oversized parts are cut back with a scalpel and the 'secret' process gets underway..... who am I kidding, it's not rocket science. Simply a 1:1 mix of the standard polymer clay and liquid polymer clay (think sticky and then some) which is applied to selected parts of the body (hint talc your fingers if you want to give this a go) Starting at the tail and progressively work forward. Each section is covered and textured then baked in the oven. This way only small parts are worked on at a time, and there is always a solid part to hold onto, without 'squidging' anything.

I think this went through the baking process about 12 times.

All that is left to do is paint the markings (including about 35 billion assorted sized spots), add real hair whiskers, a jewelled collar and lead! Simple!