How to Make Bird Beaks for Cloth Dolls: Leather and Foam vs. Polymer Clay

Those of you familiar with my work know I make a lot of birds. Until recently, the beaks for this type of artwork was made from closed-cell foam covered with leather (described in this old post).  This is a useful technique, but has some drawbacks. I've shown all the details of the process in my second video about bird heads:

Although leather creates a realistically textured beak, the downside of the material is that some shapes are difficult to do well. For years, not wanted to try alternatives, I would work with leather anyway and end up dissatisfied with the result. Artworks that don't meet my standard usually end up in in storage because I don't feel comfortable selling them. Finally, the number of misfits reached critical mass, and I decided I needed a new method. After some experimentation with polymer clay, I settled on a variation of my usual techniques. Some examples of leather vs. polymer are shown below:

A few years ago, I made a series of cranes. Some turned out fine, but others had huge beaks. I removed the heads from the figures and started over. The new beaks are much thinner and in better proportion to the head and the rest of the body (not shown). Narrow, long beaks are clearly easier to make and look much better using polymer clay. One consideration however, is that long polymer beaks tend to be heavier.


It is nearly impossible to make a thin, sturdy foam beak.  This duck's head is a good example of the problem. Even with the thinnest leather covering, the multiple layers required results in an appendage too thick and unrealistic looking. When I made a polymer beak and recreated the head, the improvement was immediate.



The last example is a Western Bluebird. The new polymer beak is much smaller and the head a more realistic shape. In this instance I didn't make a new head because of the beak alone. The original head looks pretty good, but was too small for the body. I made a new head with a correctly sized, polymer beak. The final result looks much better to my eye.


So, how do I make polymer clay beaks? The process is shown in my third video on bird heads:

Hope you learned something new. Stay tuned til next time...