Powertex Tui Sculpture

I had been planning to make a Powertex Tui Sculpture ever since I saw one at the Powertex stand at the SENZ craft expo but somehow I just hadn’t got around to making one even though I had the materials for it. Then I heard that Joanne was running another workshop in my area and decided to go along. I usually do Powertex workshops with my friend Dominique but she was back visiting her parents in France, so I went by myself this time. There were 6 of us in the workshop and of course Joanne and her husband Nick – and it was lots of fun. We were all making different things: 3 were making figurines, 2 were making mixed-media canvases and I made a couple of tuis (trying 2 different styles).

Nick makes the ‘frames’ to start the sculpture on, using wire and on a wooden block base. First you use tin foil and scrunch it up and mould it around the wire frame to start building up the shape you want. You can extra wire as required, for example to make the beak. One of my tuis was to be solid and approximate a real tui and the other was a more artistic style with a hole through the middle. Once you have the shape completed, you wrap masking tape all around it, covering up every bit of tin foil, and then paint the entire thing including the base with black Powertex fabric hardener.

Then, using the superb flexibility of Powertex fabric hardener, you mix it with roughly equal quantities of Stone Art Powder to form a modelling clay (which lasts for months if you wrap it in plastic cling film). The next step is to cover all of your sculpture with the ‘clay’. You can roll it out into thin sheets between the plastic film using a rolling pin and then press it onto the surface or just press pieces on and smooth them out, shaping the sculpture to the desired finish. I rolled out large thin pieces of clay to form the wings and cut feathers into the bottom edges before positioning them onto the back of the tuis and blending the top edges into the neck and then adding some further feather lines around the neck. The final touch is of course the round balls to form the tui’s iconic feathers on its front.

After the clay has dried, you can apply pigment powders mixed in a clear varnish. I did a light coat of a mix of the lustrous ‘Terra Green’ pigment with a touch of blue for the body , and white of course for the neck feathers – including whispy feathers at the back of the neck. A touch of bronze on the base completed the sculptures. I was very pleased with the result and the rest of the group said that they kept thinking they were real tuis.

I had thought that I would like the more life-like version most and decided that I would make that as a birthday present for my mother (so I’ll have to wait until after her birthday to post this), but I’m really starting to like the ‘arty’ version more and more as it sits on the TV cabinet in my lounge. One of the amazing things about the Powertex products is that they gradually harden over the course of 3-4 weeks and are waterproof so you can put your sculptures out in the garden if you want.