{"id":2557,"date":"2010-02-07T11:52:15","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T16:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/?p=2557"},"modified":"2017-06-12T06:10:32","modified_gmt":"2017-06-12T10:10:32","slug":"strawberry-poison-dart-frog-sculpture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/strawberry-poison-dart-frog-sculpture\/","title":{"rendered":"strawberry poison-dart frog sculpture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over Christmas, we watched David Attenborough’s fantastic Life<\/em><\/a> series, and I’ve had tiny frogs on the brain ever since…<\/p>\n

I worked so hard all day yesterday (on the secret project) that I was begging myself to do something relaxing and unrelated to work last night, so I got out the polymer clay and started mixing colours to make a Strawberry Poison-Dart Frog like the one that captured my imagination on Life<\/em>. While we watched a movie on TV, I played with the FIMO and, 2 hours later, this is what I ended up with:<\/p>\n

\"strawberry<\/p>\n

Strawberry poison-dart frogs<\/a> (Dendrobates pumilio) are found in several colour morphs<\/a>, but the most common (the one I made) is called Blue Jeans<\/em> for its blue legs – isn’t that adorable?!<\/p>\n

I was aiming for a life-sized sculpture – David Attenborough had said that they are only 1 inch long and I’d written that down in my ‘ideas’ notebook along with my sketch – but I didn’t quite manage that. My frog’s body is 1 1\/4″ long and including the legs sticking out to front and back, the finished sculpture is 1 3\/4″ long (I have small hands, so it’s probably smaller than these photos make it look).<\/p>\n

\"strawberry<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve surprised myself – I didn’t know I could do this! Yes, it did take me 2 hours, but most of that was spent on the legs. I hadn’t really considered that I’d have to make 16 teeny tiny frog toes until I got to them – not an easy task! I’m happiest with the shaping of the red clay around the eyes – it turned out exactly how I’d hoped.<\/p>\n

I think my crafting ‘style’ may be to make things so cleanly that they look like they’d be really easy to make, even though they aren’t. I see it in my crochet designs too – I simplify the shapes and colours to make my patterns easy to follow, but it’s finding a way to simplify them but to keep the most important features of whatever I’m trying to make where this ‘style’ comes into play.<\/p>\n

There seems to be a crossover between the different crafts that I do: I don’t think I could have made this frog without my years of examining the shapes of animals for my crochet patterns. I suppose you could call it an “artist’s eye”, although that sounds a bit pretentious so I won’t do that! But it’s definitely interesting how my experience in one medium is indirectly improving my skill and confidence in a completely different medium.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should make a matching frog in crochet and compare the two! What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over Christmas, we watched David Attenborough’s fantastic Life series, and I’ve had tiny frogs on the brain ever since… I worked so hard all day yesterday (on the secret project) that I was begging myself to do something relaxing and unrelated to work last night, so I got out the polymer clay and started mixing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-polymer-clay"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}