Hey everyone! Welcome to this weekend’s: What The Bleep Am I Doing? An Artist’s Guide To All Things Creative. This week, I’ll be talking about a special type of EVA foam: Cosplay Clay.

Yep, y’all heard me correctly. Cosplay clay. It’s a material completely made out of EVA foam. But with the properties of clay! After it dries with any shape you have decided to mold it into it has the properties of EVA foam. It’s probably one of the most helpful types of EVA to work with. But, just like every other material out there it’s not without its pitfalls that you have to work around.

The clay will dry fairly quickly. Now, that’s definitely a good thing so you don’t have to worry about your project losing its shape or getting any unwanted scratches or indentations. And believe me I’ve had more than my fair share of those that I had to fix. But, it has its drawbacks.

For one, if you were to accidentally leave the lid open even by just a bit, you’ll come back to find that your whole tub of cosplay clay is completely dried out and practically useless. This happens too when you’re trying to mold your clay and work with it, it’ll get dry spots.

But! Fear not my friends for there is a way to solve problem! Just have a handy dandy water bowl by your side when you work. So, whenever you get those pesky dry spots on your clay you just dip your fingers into the water bowl and put it on the dry spots. Just make sure to rub the water in so it smooths out. It’s also really handy to smooth out the pesky wrinkles that tend to pop up when you work with it.

The other drawback to this material is it can break fairly easily depending on how thick you make your pieces. For example, when I made my chakrams the end points–sadly can’t think of a better word for them, that extended off of the smaller circles on the main base I accidentally made them too thin making it easy for one of them to crack off in a photoshoot–thankfully that happened at the end of the shoot. But, just like with the clay dryness, this can be fixed too.

All you have to do, is when making small or thin pieces like those end points on the chakrams, simply reinforce it with more clay. Yours truly just forgot to do that with her project. It’s probably and practically the easiest way to fix it. You can reinforce it with Worbla, but that would honestly take a lot more time and it would be a lot harder.

Well, that’s all for this article! More than likely there will be a part two to this since there is plenty more I can tell y’all about this amazing material. That’s all for now my little Rebels!

Rebel Fae out!