Garden figurine "Owlet"

Garden figurines - a luxury that not everyone can afford. Agree, during the summer season you need so many things that it’s somehow a pity to pay three to five thousand for a beautiful, but not functional thing. Meanwhile, while there are long winter evenings outside the window, you can spend them making garden sculptures with your own hands. To begin with, we would suggest making something not too bulky, for example, an owl figurine.
For the sculpture we will need a convenient work place and a place for kneading the mixture, building plaster (about 6 cups), water, wooden skewers or thick wire, a mold (5 liter bucket), a plastic bag, a package of self-hardening polymer clay FIMO or other (500 g ), gouache, two eyes (for us it’s a pair of glass marbles), two art brushes (No. 5 and No. 1), matte varnish, sculpting stacks (for us this function is performed by a regular manicure pusher), black and yellow nail polish to decorate the eyes.

Stump pedestal.
Let's start with mixing the plaster, for this we will prepare a 5 liter bucket, put a bag in it, aligning it with the walls so that it fits snugly. Separately, mix the gypsum (about 4 cups) so that it is like cottage cheese with sour cream, but homogeneous.



We quickly transfer it to a bucket; it fills one third of the bucket. Quickly wash the uniform. We insert skewers in the middle, the figurine will be attached to them, that is, half of the skewers are buried in plaster, the second sticks out at the top. Using your hands, level the surface of the plaster and leave it to harden for two hours.



The base of the figure.
Carefully remove the pedestal from the bucket and release it from the cellophane.



We mix the plaster again in the same consistency, and with our hands we put it on the skewers, envelop them, and form the contours of the figurine of a sitting owl. We wash the mold, and leave the pedestal with the figurine to harden for a day.




Modeling an owl figurine.
Take polymer clay and tools.



Tearing off small pieces from the whole piece (we immediately wrap the remaining plastic in cellophane so that the remains do not harden ahead of time), we begin to sculpt the head and shoulders, applying the clay piece by piece to the plaster base.



We draw feathers with a pusher, insert eyes (marble), sculpt eyebrows (if you want, we later abandoned them, it makes the owlet look cuter).





We sculpt the back, the base of the wings.




We paint the eyes with yellow and black nail polish (it is transparent and retains the shine of the glass).




Now we begin to sculpt the tail. To make it look more natural, we sculpt it in tiers, starting from the bottom, draw each one with a pusher, sculpt the one on top, and so on.





Now we form the wings, draw the feathers on the back.





We finalize the shape of the head, remove everything unnecessary, and bring the work to completion.




You can make a ladybug from the leftover plastic, which is what we did by gluing it to a stump.



We dry the product and paint it with gouache, based on pictures from the Internet.
We dry our sculpture for several days and cover it with matte varnish.
Let the owlet wait for spring and take its place in your dacha!