How to make a ghost out of clay
We are going to show you how to make a ghost out of clay in this tutorial. The great thing about these ghosts is that they're super easy to make and you can easily create a stand and put a light in them to make them glow and float.
What you will need:
You might be wondering how to make a ghost out of clay and be worried that it will be too heavy or too hard to make it look like it is floating. Luckily, we came up with this super simple technique that produces great and repeatable results.
Step 1
We created a reusable base to help create out ghost and for that we used Amazing Mold Putty. This material is super strong, super easy to work with, and also super easy to remove clay from. Mix the two part materials together, then make a cylinder with a rounded top roughly the size of the ghost that you want. Then set your cylinder aside for at least twenty minutes. The two part silicone mold sets in a few minutes and then fully cures after about 20 minutes.
Step 2
Next, take some white polymer clay and get it nice and conditioned. Then run it through your pasta machine or use an acrylic roller. We used setting 3 on our pasta machine to get the width we thought worked the best. Lay the slab on top of your mold. Let the clay fall naturally and it will start to take the shape of a ghost, but you’ll see that you have a lot of excess clay on one side that we'll deal with in the next step.
Take a knife and cut a slit down the clay and trim off the excess clay. Then you can use your finger to combine the sides back together. Use your finger to heat up the seem and smooth it out. Rub your finger along the seem for a bit and it will look totally seamless soon.
Then cut off any excess from the bottom so it looks more like a natural cloth ghost. You can run your finger over the edges to smooth those out too. One of the great things about this technique is is that when you put the clay over your armature it'll naturally look like a ghost with natural, flowing cloth with some nice folds.
This is the most time consuming step, but the results are well worth it! To get the best results, just keep on smoothing out the clay with your finger and all of the seems will join back together. You could also use a blow drier on the area to make the smoothing process even quicker.
Step 4
If you have clay cutters you can use those to cut out two equal size and shape eyes. If you don’t have any cutters, just use a knife and do the best job that you can.
Bake your ghost
Now You can put your ghost in the oven and bake it, you're done. After you are done baking your ghost, it will very easily pop off the mold and you can reuse your ghost mold almost infinitely. Now you know how to make a ghost out of clay! Take a look at some of the optional steps for some ideas.
You can hang your ghost made out of clay, hold it, make a base for it, or make a few more friends for it. I've made a few of them I even made a base for one and inserted an LED light in it.
To get thew floating effect on your base, use a piece of acrylic rod or straw to connect the ghost to your base. Because these ghosts are hollow, they will be very light weight and easy to keep up. We made a base out of scrap clay and painted it all black. Then we drilled a tiny hole for the rod to fit into. Then glued the rod into the inside of the ghost, then into the base.
You can also check out our video tutorial: