Before I dive into my magnet creating adventure, I wanted to show my first 100% completed project. To finish my tray I first used acrylic paint, but I couldn’t get the paint to spread nicely on my dried clay. After doing some googling to troubleshoot, I realized that it is important to smooth out clay creations with a wet sponge afterwards to ensure a really smooth surface. As I could not go back and fix this, I used spray paint that I found in my garage. I then used glossy Mod-Podge to seal the paint and add a really nice shine!

Magnet time! My goal with creating magnets was to work on building my detail skills, as well as work on combining different pieces together. I used TikTok (this link was my most used tutorial video) as my learning resource for this project, and I found all the videos to be extremely helpful. My favourite thing about TikTok tutorials is that they are usually short, simple, and to the point. My least favourite thing is that in some cases, video creators skip showing some of the important steps. But for the videos that I have found that was thankfully not the case!

  A lot of the tutorials focused on food magnets so that is what I went with! I made some cherries, a banana, and an egg. I first made the cherries which was actually quite simple. First, I created small balls of clay and then pressed them down with my thumb, sort of like you would with cookies. I then used the trusty snake technique again to make the cherry stems. To create the leaves, I just took little pieces of clay and shaped them to somewhat resemble leaves.

My next task was to create an fried egg. To make the yolk I used the same technique as the cherries and made another little ball of clay to press down. To create the egg white part, I rolled out a small piece of clay to be about 1/4” thick which is what most tutorials recommend. I then used one of my clay tools to cut out the egg white from the clay I rolled.

Lastly and definitely the most challenging, the banana. Instead of a bunch of bananas I wanted to create a single on that was half peeled as I thought that would be the easiest way to go about this task. Creating the actual banana shape was the most challenging part, followed by sticking the peels to the banana. I hand shaped all parts, and used slurry to help the pieces stick together.

When I finished, I left the magnets to dry on my kitchen table for the night. The next morning when I checked on them, my cherries fell apart when I picked them up, so I think I need to continuing working on my combining pieces skills.

Here are my completed magnets painted, sealed, and stuck to my fridge!

I’m unsure of what I want to create next, but I would like to continue to work on the skills I listed above, as well as maybe more shaping and clay colouring.

Thanks for reading!