How to make a toy out of plaster. How to make a garden figurine from plaster with your own hands. Large drinker leaf for birds and pets

Gypsum is an environmentally friendly, absolutely harmless, fairly cheap and therefore affordable material, which is often used to create various crafts. Working with him is a pleasure! This material can take any shape, quickly hardens, has a relatively small weight, and is easily painted.

All that needs to be done before you start creating gypsum crafts with your own hands is to prepare a solution. There is nothing difficult in this. It is enough to mix the powder with water. However, before diluting the plaster for crafts, pour some water into the container so as not to breathe in a cloud of plaster dust, mix, and then pour in the rest of the water. The consistency of the solution will depend on your goals. It is more convenient to make gypsum crafts (both flat and voluminous) if the solution is thick. But be warned, it sets quickly! If you have prepared half a bucket of mortar, but are going to fill in several molds with small figures, then it may freeze in the bucket. Most often, ready-made gypsum figurines are painted, but the solution itself can also be painted over. For this, gouache and any water-soluble paints are used. Even strong tea leaves, brilliant green, iodine or potassium permanganate solution added to the solution will give it the appropriate color.

Do you want to try making plaster crafts for the home or unusual toys for children? Grab the supplies you need and get started! And you will find some interesting ideas about what crafts can be made from gypsum in our master classes.

All you need to create this original craft is gypsum, water, heart-shaped molds, seashells and multi-colored pieces of glass.

Appetizing cakes - excellent. To make them, you need to stock up on cardboard, gypsum mortar, dyes and ribbons.

Does your child love to explore the world around him? Then he will appreciate this entertainment!

Now thousands, but no, probably hundreds of thousands of people are engaged in needlework at home. What materials are not used for this only: polymer clay, and beads, and beads are shorter than almost everything. You can even use shells, threads and old bottles for your crafts. With the help of imagination, you can make a real work of art out of these simple objects. But all these materials do not interest us today, we will talk about gypsum. After all DIY plaster crafts come out especially beautiful, and you can make so many interesting and even useful things out of them that you are amazed.

Why is gypsum now used by many people for their crafts? It's simple, gypsum is a very good material for this business, judge for yourself, it is environmentally friendly and does not harm either you or the environment. In a certain state, it is very plastic, but it hardens, quickly retaining the shape of the object or animal that you gave it. After the gypsum hardens, it becomes strong enough, so gypsum crafts, even if you drop it, it is not so easy to break or damage it.

Besides, gypsum crafts so exactly repeat the outlines of an object or a living being that, with good coloring, you can even confuse the craft with the original. One of the examples of do-it-yourself gypsum crafts on the New Year theme. We take a wooden stick, these are now sold, we make a kind of Christmas tree out of fabric on it, pour the whole thing into a plaster stand. We decorate the Christmas tree with bows, sweets, of course, also made of fabric and that's it, in a couple of minutes an excellent New Year's gift is ready. But we will talk about the new year a little later, now we are interested in DIY plaster crafts for a garden and a kitchen garden.

What can be done from plaster

So, what immediately comes to your mind when you hear the word "gypsum"? Well, usually people think of a hospital and some unfortunate person with a plaster on his arm or leg, and everyone immediately remembers the film “The Diamond Arm”, in which the main character just spent the entire film with jewelry on his arm from this very material. Indeed, gypsum was often used in ancient times in medicine and is used now, until nothing better has been invented for the treatment of fractures. But the use of gypsum in medicine does not interest us today.

So, what can be made of gypsum beautiful and useful for the home, what can be done independently. For example, you can make excellent vases, such vases will not only be an ornament, but will also carry a purely practical function, because they are no different from ordinary vases. You can make different leaves, you can use shells instead of molds for gypsum, and a lot of things, but the most popular among gypsum crafts, use different figurines for a summer residence and a garden, all sorts of gnomes, lizards, snow whites, mushrooms and other nonsense that is needed to decorate along the paths in your backyard.

Exactly crafts for giving from plaster now the most popular in our area. In Europe, this fashion appeared a long time ago, but here, as always, it is late, but we don’t want to lag behind the other civilized world, so such crafts are now in fashion. In stores, such dacha figurines cost a lot of money. Many of you will think why such beauty is needed for such amounts, we will answer you, and you are doing the right thing, what you are thinking, because to do gypsum crafts for summer cottages or gardens can be done at home without any problem. After all, gypsum can be bought at any pharmacy, it is sold without prescriptions and other restrictions, it is not expensive. And you will only have to get a form for casting figures. As a result, such a craft will cost you several times cheaper than in a store, and you will also have fun.

How to make a solution

It is clear that before proceeding with the manufacture DIY plaster crafts, you need to properly prepare a solution of water and gypsum. What is needed for this? Well, first of all, you need gypsum itself, you can easily buy it at the nearest pharmacy, as we have already said, this powder is not expensive and you can buy it without any problems. Be sure to think about what you will dilute the powder for crafts. Because, as we have already said, gypsum hardens very quickly. Therefore, if you dilute a little solution, then you will not have a second attempt, most likely the figurine or what you were going to cast there will be of poor quality.

Therefore, it is best to prepare a large bowl or even a small basin and dilute the solution a little more than you need, remember that you can remove the excess, but if it is not enough, you will not add it. So, in order to properly dilute the gypsum, you first need to pour some powder into a bowl, then add some water there and stir the powder. After this small portion of the solution is ready, you can add the powder and water, just do it very carefully because the powder can rise above the bowl from the water in a cloud of dust, and then you will inhale the gypsum.

In small quantities, it is not dangerous, but if you breathe in such an aerosol every day, then this can end badly for you. It is best to pour molds with crafts with a thick solution, but remember that it sets very quickly. For example, you decide to pour several figures from gypsum and for this you have prepared a small bucket of mortar, hurry up to fill in your molds, the fact is that the mortar can seize before you pour it into the molds, and then it will forever remain in the bucket and the only thing what you get is a bucket figurine.

How to paint crafts

In order to give your gypsum crafts"life", it, of course, needs to be painted. Imagine that you did not paint the figures of gnomes cast from plaster for a summer residence or garden and placed them along the path, it turns out that you have ghosts of gnomes standing along the path, you see, an unpleasant sight. It is precisely for this that gypsum crafts are painted, well, they are also painted so that they do not absorb dirt, and they can be painted in different ways. Many people prefer to add paint directly to the gypsum solution, but then the figure turns out to be one-color and does not look very nice.

Specialists in casting crafts from gypsum advise not to add paint to the solution, but to paint the figure after it has been cast and the gypsum has hardened. You can use almost any paint for this. For example, if you want to give the figurine a bronze tint, then you need to paint it in several layers with ocher. But before applying the paint, the figurine must be primed without fail, how to do this? There is really nothing complicated here. To prime the gypsum figurine, you can use carpentry glue, PVA, or just varnish.

If you use glue as a primer, then you need to apply it on a plaster figure in several layers. Why is primer applied? The fact is that the gypsum material itself is porous and is capable of absorbing a lot of things. If you paint a plaster craft without priming it before, the paint will soak into the craft, and it will not look very festive. But if you prime the surface of the figurine, then paint it and after the paint dries, cover it with varnish, you will get a great beautiful gypsum craft made by hand. Such crafts will not even be ashamed to be put up for sale.

Where to get and what can be used as a form

Forms for making DIY plaster crafts you can get your hands on it in a variety of ways. The first way is the easiest, just buy a uniform in a store, they are different. Gypsum molds can be plastic, wooden, metal, and even silicone, the latter, by the way, have recently become very popular. But you can make a mold for a plaster figure yourself. Due to its structure, gypsum allows you to make very accurate copies of even the smallest objects.

For example, you can easily cast a coin model. How to do it? We take a solution of gypsum and pour a little into a bowl or plate. After that, we lower the coin there and add the solution so that it fills the space to the middle of the coin. The work is delicate, almost jewelry. The field of how you remove the coin from the container with the hardened gypsum, you will get the shape of one of the sides of the coin. We do the second side in the same way, after that we remove the excess plaster and glue both halves of the coin. You can use these halves as a form, only then their inside must be varnished so that the gypsum does not stick to it, and then you can safely get copies of the coins. In general, in such a simple way, you can make almost any shape.

But it's best to use it for your own gypsum crafts silicone molds. Why these forms have an advantage over other materials. Well, first of all, they do not need to be lubricated with anything for a comfortable separation of the model from the mold. In addition, the elastic silicone ensures the integrity of the craft at the time when you separate it from the mold. In general, silicone as a material for molds is a very useful thing. If desired, a silicone mold can be made without any problems on your own, its production is no different from making a mold from gypsum.

Gypsum crafts for summer cottages and gardens

Now it's time for us to talk about gypsum crafts for summer cottages and gardens. That terrible time has long passed when people went to the dacha not to rest, but to work in the beds. No, the beds may have been preserved, but only in order to grow greens for the table on them. Now the summer cottage is a place for recreation and creativity. That's just about this country-garden creativity, we'll talk with you. What can be so creative in the country? And in the country, you can easily try your hand as a landscape designer. To do this, take a general look at your site and take a picture of this space in your head, what does your site look like? What is the best way to decorate it? Or rather, what we will decorate with, we have already figured out with you, but what kind of gypsum crafts for a summer residence is best done.

Here you need to turn on the fantasy. You can, of course, get by with banal swans in a non-existent lake or some other nonsense. But stupidly invented gypsum crafts, placed throughout the summer cottage, will rather interfere than decorate your garden. Come up with something original or even funny. For example, you have a small hummock in your garden, cast windows and a door from gypsum, and put a cheerful gnome or a hobbit from the fairy tales of J.R.R. .

Do you have a container near the rainwater drain in which you collect water, or just a decorative fountain in the middle of the site? Take and cast a frog with an arrow in its mouth from plaster, let it bring love to your house. If you have children who are often in the country (although now this is a rarity), then make fairy-tale characters, cartoon characters or films for gypsum.

Imagine how funny and funny penguins from Madagascar or squirrels from the Ice Age will look on your site. In general, variety and beauty crafts from gypsum for the garden with their own hands only limited by your hands, imagination and artistic ability. If you wish, you can transform your personal plot in a few days into a real park or even revive a fairy tale on it.

If you have never worked with plaster before, then it will be very useful for you to look at photo of gypsum crafts or master classes of gypsum crafts, such videos and photographs can be easily found on the Internet. The first request will give you dozens of answers. If you don’t want to include fantasy, you don’t want to make forms, and in general you are a person who has no imagination at all, but you want to do something original for your summer cottage from plaster.

Gypsum crafts can give the garden originality, emphasize the natural beauty and even become its main attraction. Children will especially like such miniature works of art. And what is most interesting, you can make garden sculptures from plaster with your own hands at home, which will be discussed in this article.

General provisions

Crafts for the garden with your own hands from gypsum give you the opportunity to roam your imagination. Thanks to the simplicity of manufacturing technology, you can give them almost any shape and color, which will allow you to populate your cottage with a variety of fabulous animals, castles and.

Here are some examples of possible directions:

• Cute little animals. Turtles, hedgehogs, frogs, kittens and other representatives of the animal world are always held in high esteem, their habitation in the high or at the edge of the path will appeal to both small members of your family and adults.

• Fairy-tale heroes . Recreating your favorite fairy tale in the garden, what could be better? Such do-it-yourself gypsum garden crafts will not only delight children, they will also make their parents smile more than once.

• Miniature architectural structures. If there are no financial opportunities to build a full-size castle, then let you have at least its reduced plaster analogue.

• Plants . From this category, mushrooms are the most popular due to their naturalness and ease of manufacture. It is on their example that we will consider further how to make gypsum toys for the garden with our own hands.

Of course, the flight of your imagination is not limited to the proposed options, but before moving on to creating more complex figures, you should practice on simple sculptures, which we will do with you now.

Creating a Gypsum Mushroom for Your Garden

Tip: Involve the kids in the process.
Such activities have a beneficial effect on the development of creative thinking and finger motor skills.

You should start by preparing all the necessary tools and materials:

Required accessories

Tools:

Materials:

Tip: cement can be used instead of gypsum.
The hardening process will take longer, but the price of the sculpture will be cheaper, and its service life will be longer.

The instructions for performing the necessary work are as follows:

Creating a leg

1. Take a plastic bottle and cut off its neck.

1. We knead the emulsion of grated soap, water and sunflower oil in a ratio of 2: 7: 1.

1. We cover the inner walls of the bottle with the resulting composition. This will make it easier for the plaster to separate from them.
2. We stir the required amount of gypsum mixture and pour it into the prepared form.

1. To reduce the consumption of the gypsum substance, we insert a smaller bottle inside, after which we press it down with some kind of improvised press.

1. After half an hour, cut off the plastic from the hardened workpiece.

Making a hat

1. We take a suitable cup and cover its inside with food cellophane. At the same time, try to avoid the formation of wrinkles so that the surface of the future workpiece comes out as smooth as possible.

1. We knead a new portion of the gypsum mixture and pour it into the prepared form.
2. We insert the previously made mushroom leg into the mass that begins to solidify.

1. After about forty minutes, we take out the resulting composition.

Foundation creation

1. We take a large cup and, similarly to the previous task, cover it with cellophane.
2. Knead the plaster again and fill the container with it.
3. We also cover the leg of the mushroom with a film and place it in the solution. This will make the product removable, which will simplify its decoration.

1. After complete solidification, we take out the craft and put it for a couple of days in a warm place.

Decor

Sculptures for the garden are decorated with their own hands from plaster spontaneously or according to a sketch.

1. With a pencil we apply the drawings that we want to see on the surface of the sculpture.

1. Using a knife or other suitable tool, add volume to the image.

1. We prime the surface with PVA glue in order to increase its adhesion.
   
2. We paint all the fragments in the desired color, glue the decorative elements.

Conclusion

Gypsum sculptures do a great job of decorating a garden. Their manufacture is quite possible with their own hands. We described the whole process above using the example of creating an ornamental mushroom. The video in this article will provide you with additional information. Good luck with your own site!

Gypsum is plastic and environmentally friendly, so fakes from it are increasingly becoming fashionable among needleworkers.

The softness and flexibility of the material allow you to make realistic figures, cut out small details and patterns, which makes gypsum crafts wonderful decorations for an apartment, garden, and vegetable garden.

Gypsum crafts attract with their simplicity and accessibility, and master classes in such creativity can be shown to young children.

Moreover, in the process, the child improves the skills of working with bulk materials, repeats or studies colors, develops fine motor skills.

Gypsum variety

Hardened gypsum is strong and hard, so crafts made from it are practical and functional. So, gypsum vases, planters, drawers, flower pots are popular.

It is easy to make garden decorations out of plaster with your own hands, such as figurines of gnomes, mushrooms, flamingos, hares, artificial flowers, decorative hatches.

Step 1 - Turn on the fantasy

There are a lot of options for plaster crafts for a garden, kitchen garden or home interior, so you need to focus on a specific area.

For example, if you have a pond, then decorate it with a frog with an arrow in its mouth, a bump can be supplemented with a miniature window and a gnome, and children and grandchildren will be delighted by their favorite fairy-tale characters hidden among flower beds and garden tools.

Step 2 - Choose a Form

If your choice fell on standard swans or gnomes, then any suitable shape, plastic, wood, metal or silicone, can be purchased at the store. For economical or original craftsmen, there is an opportunity to make the base with their own hands.

To do this, it is necessary to cut out a certain texture from the listed materials or make a mold from gypsum: dilute the solution in a container, lower the object that needs a copy into it, let the gypsum harden and repeat the procedure for the other side of the original figure.

The resulting halves are varnished, glued together and later used for the next pouring of the solution.

True, it is better to use elastic silicone molds that do not require lubrication and do not damage the fake during model separation.

You can make a silicone base yourself in the same way as gypsum.

Step 3 - Prepare the solution

All that is useful for needlework is gypsum bought at a pharmacy, ordinary water, a container for diluting it and a form for casting a figure.

To dilute gypsum for crafts, powder is poured into a medium-sized basin or large bowl, poured with water and stirred. There are no special proportions, but you need to focus on the consistency of liquid sour cream.

If your figure is conceived as one-color, then when making a solution, you can add paint to the water and only then knead the gypsum.

The amount of gypsum must be thought out in advance, as it hardens quickly, and if there is a shortage of material, it will be impossible to make a new batch in time. It is better to dilute more solution and immediately put it into action.

Note!

Step 4 - Decorate the craft

An ordinary gray figurine will not decorate your garden, so it is better to paint it thoroughly. You can look for inspiration and ideas among photos of plaster crafts.

Before applying paint, the product is primed with wood glue or PVA, and then varnished to protect it from rain, wind, snow, sunlight and other external influences.

Step 5 - Decide on a location

You can install the figure of a stork or a cow along the garden path or on the sides of the gazebo, the main thing is that they fit well into the general atmosphere.

As a warm-up, you can implement the following idea: make a shape in the form of a large sole, a footprint, or purchase a similar one in a store, cast several dozen of these crafts and lay paths in a garden or vegetable garden with them.

When arranging the figures in the backyard, you should avoid their excessive accumulation and be guided by your own taste.

However, it is better to place gnomes and flamingos in open areas, attach animals in bushes or flowers, and identify large figures - houses, fountains, flowerpots - in the middle of flower beds or near the house.

Note!

Creating with plaster is fun, easy, and most importantly, safe. All this makes this type of needlework interesting and exciting for children and adults.

Photo of gypsum crafts

Note!

"Swans in the Garden"

I want to bring to your attention a method for making garden swans from gypsum ..... I want to stipulate that the video MK was originally prepared, but due to negligence, the video files and some photos were lost .... maybe when creating the second swan, I will still be able to mount the video .. ..

You will need

1: Wire d 5 mm

2: 5L plastic bottle....square shape

3: metal mesh

Using ... in my case ... a screwdriver ..... we drill a hole for the wire in the lid ... We lay the bottle wide sideways on the work surface, and cut off the top ... Because of the loss of files, I can’t show it figuratively, but the photo shows how the side of the bottle is cut off and I can’t show ... that the end of the wire rests on the bottom .... We fill it with gypsum .... I made the gypsum mass liquid, it dries up to 5 days, but it reduces the consumption of building material ...

Next ... I worked with the KNAUF brand finishing putty .... we knead a portion of the mixture in composition similar to a very thick porridge .... if you are afraid that your mixture will dry quickly, before diluting the gypsum with water .... do this .... (dissolve a small pack of citric acid in one and a half liters of water ....) and before pouring the amount of water you need, add a little acidic solution to the water and knead the mixture ..... Put the mass on the oilcloth along the length of the bottle .. ... we put our future swan on a plaster cake ... lightly press down and lift the excess from the sides up the bottle .. in principle, as already seen in the photo ...

The thing is behind the wings ..... cut off a piece of canvas from the grid .. about 12 cells in length and 3 cells in width .... apply to the sides of the swan ... at a slight angle ... near the tail, the lower part of the wing should be raised .... coat with gypsum and while the wings dry a little ... move on to the neck ..... smear the gypsum all over the neck ... with smudges ... moisten my hands, place the gypsum mass on the neck .... the first half of the photo. ... and then we wrap it with plaster ... tightly and controlling the mass ... so that there is approximately the same thickness everywhere .. the second half of the photo

Under the mass of gypsum, the wire slightly swayed to the side .... I fixed it on both sides .... after drying, it will no longer stagger to the sides, but will stand exactly.

Let's move on to the formation of the neck ..... lightly go over the swan's neck with a brush soaked in water ... since it is completely dry with us .. this will provide easier fastening of the new layer ... And as in the photo we transform the property of the swan .... When reach the head, leave a place for the beak and sculpt the shape of the head .... after the shape is ready .... fix a small piece of bandage on it .... this way the mass will not crawl anywhere

We give shape to the wings ..... look at the photo

Because of the bandages it is not visible ... but in the place where the swan's wing was raised near the tail ... we sculpt the fourth feather, so to speak

Tail .... a piece of mesh cloth .. bend a little ... depending on how you want the tail to lie or stand .... fix it with a mass of gypsum .... by the way, I advise you to cook a little mass .... let more often ... but it happens that the product needs to dry out a little and the rest of the mass has nowhere to go (

As the tail at the base dried up a little ... we are preparing, so to speak, the foundation for the next work .. we put a little plaster on the top of the tail ... photo ...... and while the mass dries up there, we move on to the wings ... look at the photo ... .and with such bloopers then we form waves on the upper part of the wing .... sometimes I wetted my hands with water so that they would slide along the mass

Result

So ... to fix the mass on the tail and wings, we apply bandages with flaps .... Photo

We form the back ..... laying out a mass of gypsum rounding it ... photo ..... If you think that in one place or another the gypsum mass is floating, apply bandages))) .....

Let's put the layers on the tail ... photo ... By the way, on the tail, after each layer of gypsum, I sculpted a bandage)

And we move on to those parts where we have bandages applied .. we need to hide them .... in this case, we need the mass of the consistency of sour cream ... and carefully lay and smooth the layers with a brush ... photo