Supplies:

• Red, transparent, green, white, yellow, and black polymer clays
• A roller (or pasta machine if you have one)
• Exacto knife
• A needle tool or toothpick
• Small ball point tool
• Aluminum foil

Step 1: Mix Your Clay

There are a few colors we’ll need to mix for this project to help make the watermelon look more realistic. You can mix your red polymer clay with a little bit of white to lighten it just a bit, and then you’ll want to mix that into translucent clay. This helps give the clay that “watery” look that watermelon has.

To get a nice dark green for the rind, you’ll want to mix the green, yellow, and black clays until you get your desired shade. The same goes for the light green rind accents; mix green and yellow, and white if needed, to create a bright, light green.

Lastly, we’ll need clay for that white part between the green rind and the watermelon. For that, you can just mix white and translucent together.

Step 2: Stack Your Layers

I did a slight gradient between the three colors in order to create a cohesive transition. I still wanted to have a line where each color definitively ended, but I also didn’t want it to be a super harsh line. This is completely optional. You can either roll out your colors and stack them up, with the dark green and white being the thinnest layers, and the red being the thickest, or you can create your gradient!

I used the tear drop gradient technique to create mine. You could try using the skinner blend, but I think the tear drop method gives more flexibility for where in the blending process you can stop.

Once you have your layers, you’ll want to shape them accordingly. Since I was doing a watermelon slice, I pushed the red to a point and crunched everything together to make a slightly thicker piece. When I made the front legs of the dragon, I just rolled up blend up into a tight tube, blended the ends, and shaped it into an arm and a paw.

Step 3: Detail your rind

Once you’ve shaped out your main watermelon creation, it’s time to add the strips to the watermelon rind! I did this by rolling out verrrrrry thin snakes of the light green. I placed them on the rind, pressed them onto the clay to flatten them out a little bit, and then used my ball point tool to blend them out into the green clay, flaring it out as I went to make them look a little more random.

Step 5: Add Your Seeds

When I was happy with my texture, I used a ball point tool to carefully mark out teardrop shaped holes in the red clay. This would be where I’d bury the seeds. You can play with adding a very thing layer of your translucent clay on top of some of the seeds to make it look like they’re beneath the surface, but I chose not to do this for this project.

Step 6: Bake

After you’ve gotten to this point, your piece is ready to bake! This is thicker than our piece from the last blog post’s tutorial, so I baked this for 30 minutes at 275 degrees Fahrenheit, but you’ll want to follow your package’s instructions.

Step 7: Glaze (optional)

Pretty self-explanatory, but if you’d like to, now is the time for glazing! I almost always glaze my pieces; it’s just a personal preference. I don’t think my work looks finished until it’s glazed, but there are plenty of other artists who don’t glaze and their work looks finished as is! It’s up to you :).

And there you have it! Your own polymer clay watermelon creation.

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the dragon this technique was applied to:

What is your favorite summery snack? I’d love to hear in the comments below!