In Progress » Dagobah Diorama » Shinola Happens…

…and so does the other stuff.

Yeah… although some of you out there seem to think I am perfect at this (weirdos) you are sadly misinformed. I make mistakes, big and small, but in the end they all help me to learn and grow. Todays mistake is not a new one, in fact it’s based on something I have a love/hate relationship with. Celluclay. Now I love Celluclay, don’t get me wrong, but it does have a lot of drawbacks due to its moisture content. My usual issues lie with it warping wood to pulling up at the edges. These I have workarounds for. It would seem that every time I think I’ve finally got celluclays problems all figured out, it throws me a new one.

Celluclay shrinks when it dries. That’s not a new or surprising issue. It is paper mache afterall and mostly water until dry so as the water leaves the clay pulls and shrinks. When I made the first trees there was some cracks on the thinner parts of the trunks. No big deal though as I’ve dealt with Celluclay cracks before. Just fill them and move on…. or so that’s what usually happens.

Because I applied the Celluclay so thinly to such a smooth surface, the clay shrunk a great deal last night under the heater while drying some other trees. Not the new trees though. No… of course it was the ones I had already painted. AAAHHRRGGHHH!!!!!

So what can I do to fix this? Well, I took a good look at the trees and noticed something. The bottom of the trees where the clay was much thicker did not crack at all. The parts where it did crack were really paper thin. Okay… that gives me a solution, but not one I really wanted to do. Basically I needed to add a second layer of celluclay to all of my trees. Doh!

So I did just that. The completed trees now have a 1/8″-3/16″ thick layer of celluclay on the trunks applied over the first layer. In fact I applied cellclay to a couple new trees today and fully plan that to be the first layer and to add an additional thicker layer tomorrow or whenever it’s dry. The trees I made yesterday got another coat as well.

In the end it’s a few hours more work, but it would really suck if this happened later after I gave it to the client. Better to have it break now and early in the process where I can problem solve. I debated even posting about this, but I figure that someone out there will eventually look at this build as an example for their own trees and possibly have the same problem. Now they’ll have a solution. At least I hope so! The new clay layer has to dry yet.