Clay Base for Beaded Wire Tree

A couple of months ago, I posted this beaded wire tree tutorial but without the base since I wasn't decided back then where I wanted to mount it. I was thinking of a gem looking rock, a bonsai pot, or a crystal dish where I could surround the base with lovely pebbles, but I couldn't find the time to visit Divisoria which I'm positive would have these things. So, I just thought of something that I can get easily, then I came up with the clay idea. 

This autumn tree is a part of a new project I made. I'll be making a blog post about it later, too.

I have a white air dry clay that I was going to use for this but when I got this mudlike hardening clay, I thought that it is the perfect one for this project. (See where you can get this hardening clay and white air dry clay in this post.)

I just estimated and cut the amount of clay I would use and flatten it a bit with the use of a rolling pin. When I got the size and the shape I wanted, I just pushed the ends of the roots of the wire tree into the clay. As you can see in the picture above, the roots were still a bit of a mess so I trimmed them a bit before mounting them on the clay. The clay was soft and I had no trouble getting the wires in but I still added some more clay on top of the roots just enough to leave out the parts I wanted exposed. I'm sorry I wasn't able to take pictures of the whole process because my hands were both covered in mud at that time. I was by the way using a ceramic tile as my working surface. 

This is when it was still drying up, the darker part's still wet. There were some cracks when the clay dried up so I just added thin layers of clay to fill up the cracks and covered the surface.

I did the same on my autumn tree, with just a bit flat and thinner base as I was planning to make it a part of another project I have in mind. 

I used watercolor to paint over the clay, just a mixture of colors to imitate autumn leaves covered earth. For the gold tree, I just mixed up colors to make a shade that looks a bit like gold. 

Then, I glued beads on the base, the same beads I used on the trees to make them look like fallen leaves. 

To add gloss, I finished them off with mod podge. And it's done. Now I can make more beaded wire trees. I'll try to make a small pot or rock with clay to see how they would look like, but I'm glad that I only needed clay to make a great base.

You can try making one when you have free time on your hands. The making of the tree took me hours but it's easy, just a bit long to finish. Making the clay base is easy, too, I just let it dry overnight before I painted over it, but I have noticed that it was already dry even after only a few hours.

I hope you like it. Thanks for reading.