How to Make Clay Carnations

Here's another step-by-step tutorial for creating clay Carnations.   This tutorial by Priya Nanthakumar uses air-dry clay to create the flowers.   About a year ago, we posted a Carnation tutorial which adapted a sugarcraft tutorial to air-dry clay.   The methods used are slightly different in each tutorial but both result in a quite realistic Carnation.

Here's a few tips when following this tutorial:
Author recommends oil paints to pre-tint the clay but acrylic paints may also be used.   Artists quality oils and acrylics will give you stronger reds and dark colors than craft paints.   If you want pastel pinks or yellows, craft acrylics could be used instead of the tube paints.


Another option for pre-tinting your air-dry clay would be the paste colorants used by sugarcraft and cake artisans.   Wilton is a well-known brand, but there are a few others such as AmeriColor.

This Carnation tutorial uses a circle cutter and a leaf cutter.   There's a lot of things around the kitchen you could substitute for the circle cutter, such as a soup can.   But you can also make your own cutters following instructions from previous posts. Click here to make your own cutters from aluminum sheets or click here to make a leaf cutter for free out of cardboard.

Another tool called for is a leaf veiner.    If you don't have one, just go outside and find a large, green leaf to use for embossing leaf veins.   I wouldn't worry too much about it being an actual "Carnation" leaf....as long as the leaf has well-defined veins.   ;-)   If you have a molding compound...make your own re-usable veiner by making a mold of that leaf!

A knitting needle and/or a (clay) needle tool could substituted for the frilling tool.   That sums it up for the tools needed....so there's no excuse now not to make some pretty Carnations!   (Well, except maybe getting the time to actually DO it!   LOL)