Mod a Vinyl Art Toy With Sculpey

I'm a fan of art toys and buy lots of them. That often leads to duplicates. Being an artist myself, I decided to finally use some of those duplicates to modify one myself. I've made some art toys from scratch by 3D printing and laser cutting, but modifying a dunny seemed like a lot of fun too, so I decided to give it a try.

Using sculpey and a bit of paint, you too can mod your own art toy.

You'll want to design your own, so many of the steps will be mainly to show progress, but I'll describe the various tools and techniques I used along the way.

vinyl toy - I'm using a dunny from Brandt Peter's The 13 series.

Super Sculpey

X-acto knife

sylus

white spray paint

spray laquer

acrylic paint

paintbrushes

paper towels

cup of water

To prepare your Sculpey, knead it until it's soft.

The Sculpey sticks well to the vinyl, so start by just pressing the clay firmly onto the toy.

Once in place, you can sculpt it by hand and use tools for tight spaces.

You can also use the X-acto to cut off excess clay like where I cut out the "nose" area on the goggles.

Continue adding and sculpting clay.

Some textures can be sculpted by hand or with tools, but for subtle textures, you may want to make an impression with something that has the texture you want. I added a texture to the strap by rolling the grip of my stylus over the strap after I'd sculpted it the way I wanted.

When making pieces that need to be symmetrical, begin with two balls of equal size.

Once my clay balls had been formed, I squished them onto the feet of the dunny. After making the impression of the feet, I removed them to sculpt the toenails. Once they had been sculpted I was able to reattach them and continue sculpting.

I made the tail and twisted it to somewhat match the horns before attaching it.

Bake your toy at 200 degrees for 15 minutes.

After allowing your toy to cool, spray paint it white. You don't necessarily need to get a solid white layer. What you're looking for in this step is to cover any dark colors that were present on the toy before you began modifying it. For example, the horns on my toy needed to be covered before painting. It prevents you from having to put tons of coats of acrylic in order to cover the original color.

To get your textures to stand out, use a dry brush technique.

After painting the area with one color, load a small amount of paint on the end of a square brush and wipe most of it off on your palette. Then, lightly brush the paint onto the raised areas of your toy. I used dry brush on the horns and strap.

Continue painting until you're happy. Give it a once over to make sure you didn't accidentally scrape or rub paint off a previously painted section.

Spray your toy with a clear varnish and you're done.

Here's a few other progress shots of other dunnys for further inspiration.

Have fun!