Pg1 Harvest Tile Swap

I joined the Papermakers group on Yahoo and have learned a lot. I joined this swap to learn more. Here are the three tiles I made for the swap.

Following is a pictorial journal showing just how I sculpted my tiles. The parameters for the swap were to send in three tiles on the harvest theme approximately 8.5 inches square. Well, I dunno if I made them the right way and they're certainly not rectangular, but the size is kinda ballpark. I pulped cattail fluff and fresh bulrush (tules) and, instead of pulling sheets, sculpted glops of pulp on the mold. I only have one mold and, since procrastination is my middle name, needed to use it once a day for three days. So I had to figure out how to remove formed pulp without destroying all my hard work. White glue and heat guns are wonderful inventions. Also, being primarily a polymer clay artist, I am accustomed to immediate results, so wanted my tiles in short order to be firm and further workable for surface embellishment. Ovens are another wonderful invention!

I wanted to do something with the Greenman aspect of the Celtic god, Cernunnos, since the last harvest celebration of the year, Samhain, is His Festival. To accomplish the Greenman aspect, I needed a face mold. The ruffle on one face mold was perfect, but the mask was too small. So I combined it with another mask mold I had handy. I used a glass surface to work on with a sheet of typing paper underneath as a rough guide for sizing the tile.
I wrapped the larger face mold with plastic because I learned, from other list members, paper has a mighty grip when it shrinks while drying. The plastic wrap was to insure removal from the mold wasn't an impossible task. It worked quite successfully! I placed a length of plastic wrap about the size of a sheet of typing paper over the mask with the ruffle and then fit the larger mask on top of the ruffle.
Now the fun part. Being a mean little kid, I loved this cuz it was like playing in mud!!! I grabbed a handful of cattail fluff pulp and placed it onto the mold. I gently poked it with my finger to blend each glop with the previous one and did not pay much attention to shape at this point. I just made sure everything on the mold was covered completely and glopped (technical term grin) out the general shape and size of the tile.
After glopping all the cattail fluff onto the mold, I soaked some dried bulrush pulp until it was malleable. I didn't whirl it in the blender to repulp it, I left it in the little snippets of paper it had dried into for storage. I pulled the pieces that were too thick apart and randomly placed torn bits here and there. I was hoping for contrast and was most pleased with the finished results!
Now I needed to pull out as much moisture as possible without losing the malleability of the pulps. I used a makeup sponge because of it's absorbent quality, its smooth texture and its smallness - giving me control. I started in the middle of the tile on the face and would blot, squeeze out the water into a bucket, blot, squeeze and so on until I had pulled up as much water as possible from the entire tile.
Occasionally, the blotting would pull the pulp apart, so I dipped my finger into the bucket and glopped on a small wad, jabbed it gently with my fingertip to blend it in and reblotted the area.
After I finished blotting, I smashed my thumbs into the eye sockets and squidjeed them around (another technical term) to push some pulp into eyebrows and define the eye sockets more. I pinched along the outer edges of the eyebrows to give them more definition.
I pushed my fingergips along the sides of the nose to define the nostrils and used my fingernail to shape where the holes should be.
Finally, I felt for the lips on the mold below then used my fingernails to form the upper lip in the general location. After forming the upper lips, I gently pushed below where I wanted the lower lip to be to make the pulp raise a little above my finger while pressing the pulp under my finger a bit thinner.