Supplies:

• Clay in your desired color
• A roller or pasta machine
• An exacto knife
• A medium or large ball point tool depending on how big of a wing you’re making
• Chalk pastels or eye shadow (optional)
• Brush to apply pastels

Step 1: Flatten your clay

Once your clay is conditioned, you’ll want to roll it out into a flat sheet.I rolled mine between 1/16″ and 1/8″, but you’ll be flattening it out, so the size at this point isn’t too important. Eventually you won’t want it to be too thick, however, or it won’t have that petal feel.

Step 2: Cut your petal

Before we start working the clay, we’ll want to cut out our basic shape. You’ll want to cut it a big smaller than you intend it to be; once we start using the ball point tool, we’ll be spreading the clay out, making the overall shape bigger. You can always trim it up as you work, however!

For my particular wings, I kept it pretty simple with a flattened tear drop shape.

Step 3: Shape your petal

This is where the delicate petal look is created. Using your ball point tool (with the size I’m creating, I found that a bigger one works nicely), you’ll want to push down into your clay slightly and drag the tool towards the outer edge of your petal. These will make shallow grooves in your clay. Thinning it this way adds subtle waves to the petal and helps create a more realistic effect.

Once the body of your petal looks the way you want, you can go back over the outer edges in particular to help give the edge a “wavy” look, which will help when we shape the edges. For this, carefully peel your petal off of your surface, and use your fingers to softly brush up the clay on the outer edge to curl it inwards slightly.

Step 4: Apply your shading

To give some extra emphasis to the curled edges of the petal, I took some chalk pastels in a dark pink and brushed it around the petal, as well as on top of it, just to help give it some more depth and interest.

Finishing your wings

Since I wanted more than one petal to make up the wings, I just followed the above steps with smaller and smaller shapes so that I could layer these all on top of each other for a frillier wing.

Before I baked the wings, I trimmed up the bottom edge of my wing in order for it to be better suited for laying against the back of my dragon, and I inserted a small wire into the base so I could attach it after baking.

I baked these for 15 minutes as they are pretty thin by the time they are finished, but be sure to follow your package’s instructions.

Once they were cool, I chose to finish them off with glaze to help protect the chalk pastels. This is what they should look like:

And here is how I applied these wings:

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! What other kinds of things should I talk about for the blog? Are there other tutorials you’d like to see?