How to Give a Doll Elf Ears

You can always just wing it, sculpting elf ears straight onto the rubber head. I've done this in the past. I've even cut Barbie's ears off, sculpted ears separately, and glued the new ones on. With my failed attempts, I ran into two problems: I needed something for the clay to lean on (otherwise it wouldn't stay up), and there was nothing to stop the sculpted ear from easily popping off.

So far, the best way I've found is to add a small wire support. You have structure for the clay, and you ensure a level of stability. To accomplish this, poke a hole through the rubber using a needle or straight pin and use pliers to push the wire in. To make sure both sides are even, I found it helpful to use the pliers to pull the wire through the neck hole.

Before I go into the sculpting itself, I want to address the fact that both of the models I use are bald. Hair can become a big problem when sculpting. If you're not planning to reroot your doll or give it a wig, make sure the hair is tied back really well and out of the way.

It's not just that hair sticks to the clay, but if you accidentally sculpt around one strand and you pull it out, that strand will cut your new ear off or mangle it. Which is really frustrating when you spend 30 minutes to an hour carefully shaping and smoothing. I've learned this one the hard way. It's much easier and safer to just chop all the hair off beforehand.

Now that that's out of the way! Here are the materials you'll need:

• Apoxie Sculpt

• Flat-edged sculpting tool or Q-tips

• Water

• Sandpaper

• Wire

• Pliers

Start with a small amount of clay. You don't need much at all. I used about a quarter of the amount shown above.

To create the ears, I use my flat sculpting tool to smooth the clay downwards (removing a lot of it in the process) to create a natural transition between the existing ear and the new one.

The flat tool is also good for shaping the ear. I like to continue some of the existing creases into the sculpted ear. Additionally, a wet q-tip is useful for smoothing the clay. Make sure all sides of the wire are covered.

If you want more insight on how to sculpt an ear in general, here is great a tutorial from Ace of Clay, which shows how to make an ear from scratch. You might find it useful. 🤷

Here is an example of how the ears can be shaped. I ended up redoing the first attempt in favor of trying a new style. I find that if you make the ears stick out, it's easier to actually see them. Otherwise, they tend to be covered up by the hair.

Don't worry if they don't match perfectly or if they are not perfectly smooth. You can always go back over it a second time or sand off the excess when dry.

And if you're wondering what's behind the ear on this one, I was experimenting with using hot glue as support. But since this left gaps for me to have to go back and fill in later and my sister snapped the right ear off after five minutes of playing with it, I find the wire method to be much more practical.

Another side note: clean up the clay off of the doll's face as best as you can before it cures. It can be pretty tough to get off if you let it dry. Not a huge deal, especially if you're painting over the whole face, but something to keep in mind!

Apoxie sculpt takes 24 hours to fully cure, but in 2-3 hours, it will be firm enough for you to go back and add more clay if that's what you need to do. The longer you wait, the harder the clay will be/the more stable it will be when you go in for a second round of sculpting.

As for sanding them, I would leave it until overnight when the clay will be more fully cured. But once you have the shape that you want, and you've sanded them smooth, you just have to color match some paint and paint them!

Obviously, you don't have to remove their faces and paint the entire head as I did. But if you are going to repaint them, now would be a good time to remove the face. If you paint the entire head rather than just the ears, you ensure that the ear color match perfectly with the rest of the face just in case there are slight differences in the skin tones, which there likely will be.

And that's basically it! Have fun making beautiful elf dolls! If you want my step-by-step for giving your doll's gauges like my male model here, I have an article for that as well. Happy sculpting!

Love,

Haley

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