The Bottom Line
Pros
- Easy to use has many different sized faces
- Faces include detailed eyes and noses
- Can be used with many materials including icing, candle wax, polymer clay
- Includes two sizes of hands and feet
Cons
- Faces are very flat, they need to be added on to a base shape to make a doll head
- Difficult to use with firmer polymer clays, best with soft clay.
- Only two of the faces on the set are suitable for 1:12 miniatures, others are slightly too large
- Feet are small
- Faces may be adaptable for 'character' dolls, but are hard to adapt to 'normal' individuals.
Description
- Good range of faces but all are caricatures.
- Better with soft modelling materials, firm polymer clays are hard to shape.
- Face size is not to 1:12 dollhouse doll scale.
- Only faces, top surfaces of hands and feet in two sizes can be molded. Faces have no neck.
- Great for creating character faces which need a flat back. (Green Man sculptures, building details, jewelry etc.)
Guide Review - Sculpey Flexible Push Mold
These flexible molds with their sets of hands and feet would seem at first sight to be useful for novice doll makers. Unfortunately, although they produce detailed faces and top surfaces of hands, their proportion and scale makes them of limited use for dolls. A normal adult head ranges between 8 and ten inches in length. In 1:12 scale this means a regular head should be 2/3 to 5/6 of an inch long. The majority of heads produced by this mold are 15/16 inch long and none have a neck stem, only a face.
The molds do not have a solid base and flex when you fill them with firm substances like polymer clay. This flexing can result in wider than expected faces and noses if you need to pop out your face. The molds are best used with soft polymer clay, or pourable materials like plaster or wax which can be allowed to set up. The faces tend to have broad noses and full cheeks, which makes them easier to use as caricatures rather than dolls which represent average people.
The feet and hand molds produce good detail for fingers and toes, but the feet are very short (5/8 inch and 3/4 inch long)and both feet and hands have too limited a length to the wrist or ankle to allow the pieces to be directly attached to wire or pipe cleaners to make a body. If you cast the hand mold with an extra length of clay on the wrist end, that length can be easily added to the hand to form an arm suitable for attaching to wire. The foot mold will need to have additional material added on after it is removed from the mold.
Although these molds are useful, they should be listed as miniature faces. The title miniature dolls implies they will make scale miniature dolls which they will, but only with modification. The hand sections may be useful for adding detail to polymer clay hands if that is a problem for you.
