Cold Porcelain Flowers: Beginners’ Guide

Hello everyone, 

I get asked how to use Cold Porcelain to make flowers at least a couple of times a week, so now my website is blog friendly, I have finally decided to introduce my beloved medium to those of you who haven’t had the pleasure to try it yet. 

Cold Porcelain is air dry clay, predominantly used for flowers. Contrary to what you may expect based on its name, it is flexible to touch when fully dry.  It’s not edible but not toxic, so the veiners and cutters used for sugar can be used for clay ( rinse in soapy water in-between ) and, on a whole, CP is quite similar to sugarpaste, to work with: it rolls as thin or thinner, you also need to wire it, be it less often, you can tint and tone it with with food gels and dusts, as well as oil paints and more, and you can buy really decent  CP brand inexpensively in the UK these days. You can also make Cold Porcelain clay yourself.  Cold Porcelain Flowers are pretty much everlasting, when made and cared for correctly.  The experience has shown that even the most complicated flower can be made by a complete beginner, if they are determined enough.

And now let’s take some guesswork out of it, for those of you, who are planning to give using this wonderful clay a go sometime in the near future. I will do my best to keep it to the point.

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WHAT DO COLD PORCELAIN FLOWERS FEEL LIKE TO TOUCH

When a flower, made out of branded Cold Porcelain is fully dry, it’s flexible and soft, ‘leathery’  to touch,  or at least soft-ish, depending on the brand and your temperature / humidity.  It does not break when dropped, and it would take quite an effort to disassemble it in any way.  You can prepare Cold Porcelain clay yourself and make some awesome flowers with it, but bear in mind while looking ok,  it’s less flexible and NOT unbreakable, in my experience, even as the best case scenario.  It also dries out of shape at times. I used DIY clay using the video recipe I add at the end in the first year or so, as it was cheaper given all the initial learning waste. Here’s 2 examples of flowers made with self – made CP in 2018, the Poppy tutorial is on my Youtube.

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WHAT IS IT LIKE WORK WITH?

Cold Porcelain is quite similar to gumpaste, rolls very thin, maybe thinner than sugar at its thinnest. The best way to roll it out, is to use a plastic sheet, medium thickness. I use a basic document folder cut to different sizes. 

ROLLING OUT YOUR COLD PORCELAIN

IMPORTANT: before using such a sheet for the first time, you’ll need to dip a cotton ball into baby oil, make sure the oil does not drip off it, and work through your entire sheet, covering it well,  leaving no gaps. Once past the initial ‘greasy’ point, it will be good to go permanently, if clay is very sticky on some occasions, use a touch of grease on needs’ bases. 

You can also roll your CP straight on the green board. Make sure that the board is prepared with Petal Base, or a thin layer of some grease. Corn flour can work too.  Plastic sleeve is a MUST when your DIY clay is just made, branded straight out of the pack, or when you need to roll out very thin. ALWAYS use plastic SLEEVE over your CP mass, is using PASTA MACHINE.

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WIRING COLD PORCELAIN

Due to its properties, Cold Porcelain needs to be wired a lot less than sugar. This is particularly handy when we are talking tiny multiple petals and such like. For larger petals, especially the large crown of the outside layer petals, if we are making Peony, for example, it might be tempting to skip the whole fiddly wiring business. But don’t be deceived by the easiness of Cold Porcelain in this case. Yes, the petals won’t break or fall off, but being heavy, they may ‘sink’ over time, so do please wire because,  after all, you will also be enjoying not wiring the 60-100 inner petals’ bulk and the sleek flower neck that comes with only partial wiring. 

USING VEINERS

You generally need them as much ( or little ) as for sugarpaste and if you have some already, use them for CP and wash in soapy water between mediums.  As a complete beginner, you’ll be good to go just purchasing Rose and multi-leaf Veiner, the two would take you a long way. Sometimes you don’t need them at all, as with my Peony and Roses, see pic below.  Another way is to feed into your particular inspiration and purchase  the full set you need for a particular project, often the less commonly made flower. This might be very helpful result and confidence- wise for you as a beginner and might even totally hide your ‘beginner-ness’. If you work with gumpaste already, you’d  know if some workaround not having the precise veiner would work just as well for you, of course. 

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TINTING YOUR COLD PORCELAIN FLOWERS 

The main tinting mediums are: oil paints, pastels / chalks, oil pastels,  food dusts and gels ( gels for tinting only)  and, very rarely, just for things like the surface dots on Orchids, Acrylic ( never for actual clay tinting ). 

People tend to be afraid of toning CP with oil paint, but it is not scary and allows the most beautiful, life-like colour blend. Winsor & Newton is a good make to use. If you don’t like the idea of using oils or run out of colours, try pastels in pans or shaved down chalks. ‘PANPASTELS’  is a great brand ( pink pot on the pic below), I purchase the colours separately on needs’ bases and never as a set, as I wouldn’t use most colours.  Oil pastels are great for colour variety and matt finish and food dusts are great for bright colours, as long as you apply in layers not to clog your veiner imprint. Beware though, food dusts tend to be less fade proof over time. 

You must use quick dry spray to dry your oils, and chalk fixative to fixate your CP ( since it doesn’t melt without changing shape like sugar at steaming, but in fact does the opposite, steaming won’t do here ). Don’t be tempted to assemble your oil tinted greens and pinks in one bouquet and drive it down to your mom’s on Mother’s day, it may end in pink/green blend disaster. A variety of dedicated sprays is available in art shops. There’s some talk of chinese clay MR Clear or something to that effect, being the best barrier to use ( there’s a pic on my Instagram few years back) but I every time I used it, I bitterly regretted it, it faded and dulled my colours, never again.

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OTHER STUFF TO KNOW 

CP dries a touch transparent, which I, personally, love.  Most CP brands dry just off white in colour, too… This I don’t love one bit, and go lengths to find brands that dry white (not easy).  To avoid both of the above you can add approx. ⅕ of very white clay, Modena Soft in Blue Packaging or Artista.  Both are similar to DECO clay, and none of these , to which I refer as  ‘mixer’ clays, are actually Cold Porcelain.  Mixing with white  is a very common practice though not something I, personally, use much for flowers, though always for foliage.  Using the mixers makes petals whiter and the definition more visible, at the expense of, in my view, the precious life-like look of petals. This is less obvious in pictures, so the colour and the texture shows but a certain ‘wooden-ness’ of petals doesn’t. Just to add,  there’s DECO flower school , which uses these airy super white non-cold porcelain clays on their own, to make flowers ( well, the school uses DECO, but you don’t have to! ).  Those flowers can be stunningly beautiful, but on closer inspection, they look more decorative than life like in their features. It is worth a google though.

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IMPORTANT: Cold Porcelain clay  shrinks in different proportions depending on the make, I found it much less of a problem than expected, actually. 

Finally, Cold Porcelain is sometimes referred to as ‘Polymer Clay’ but it seems to me, that Polymer Clay is an ‘umbrella’ notion encompassing  different clays across the range, on the opposite  side of which is oven baked FIMO, also very much known to be ‘polymer clay’ at least to google, call your CP whatever you want but do consider this interesting fact when tagging your work.

IS COLD PORCELAIN EDIBLE / CAN IT BE USED ON CAKES

Cold Porcelain Clay is not edible, which, actually,  allows it to be  perceived as a more ‘legit’ art form as compared to sugar, rightly or wrongly. Botanical Sculpture. So there. I owe Cold Porcelain Medium an opportunity to teach flowers at Iconic Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and to freelance for the BBC props department, among other non-frequent but precious to me gigs.   

Cold Porcelain is non toxic, and it seems to me, that sticking some CP flowers on top of the cake with separation barrier of rice paper etc is no different to sticking a bunch of wires inside the cake, but in cake circles not everyone will love the idea of it, be warned.  If planning to use on cakes commercially, do seek an advice from the guys who issue your food cert / the liability insurance and obtain signed ‘go ahead’  from your paying customer. 

WHICH COLD PORCELAIN BRAND TO USE AND WHERE TO PURCHASE ? 

The best CP to use is ‘Thai Modern Clay’ based on combination of its properties as a clay and how easy it is to actually go and buy it. I sell it in my veiner shop one unit at the time, for those of you who want to pick up a quick pack with your main veiner order and don’t want to pay extra postage buying elsewhere or are stuck for ideas where to look. The best place to get it, though, is Sugarin UK shop, which also sells a good selection of decent flower wire and many other handmade flower craft accessories. If you are a transatlantic flower artist, feel free to get in touch with me,  I might be able to point you in the right direction. 

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SELF MADE ( DIY )  COLD  PORCELAIN

You can make your own CP. Here’s the video I made on it, the recipe is not mine but is the best I tried ( excuse the old logo ). The main factor in whether or not you’ll succeed in making a good paste,  is the right quality of glue, and sadly in some countries the local glue just doesn’t  appear to have the right composition for CP.  

 

Here in the UK, I would just use ‘sticky’ glue from the sewing department in Hobbycraft costing £3.00 . Some makes of glue do seem more promising, but when I look at the prices of those,  £4.00 for a tiny bottle, I figure that it definitely is not worth the effort, fiddling with something that will, no matter how well turned out, be inferior to branded CP without costing much less.  After I’d used self-made flower paste using Nicholas Lodge’s recipe with great results and very little cost while playing with sugar flowers, having to actually buy cold porcelain came to me as an unkind blow, but there you have it. If you are in USA etc, and can’t get CP for love nor money, it might be worth trying ‘Cold Porcelain Glue’ which can be purchased on Ebay. Though I’d not used it personally, it’s the next best thing, I hear. 

HOW TO LOOK AFTER YOUR COLD PORCELAIN CLAY FLOWERS?

Once assembled using wires  for heavier petals & foliage, gapless glue layer  on the wire when stemming and durable tinting materials as main, if not the only ‘musts’, you should  keep your Cold Porcelain flowers away from direct sunlight, greasy dust, steam, freezing temperatures and water ( yes there is waterproof CP, no I’m not going there in this intro blog ). 

You must brush the dry dust off periodically and ensure that your flowers do not touch something which will cause them to change shape ( as in one flower head accidentally resting against the wall) If that happens , you can re-shape it gradually, using cut to size sponge or other support, and it should be good within a week or less.  Instant re-shaping would require a hair dryer, but that can get out of hand and spoil your flower completely so don’t chance it with your fave bloom.  

And this is all I was going to cover today, seems to be plenty enough as my first CP info helping. THANK YOU to all those of you, who had the patience to read this blog to the end, I hope you found it helpful. Excuse any typos. I hope you will try and love Cold Porcelain the way I do. Good Luck! FEEL FREE to leave COMMENTS about your experience with materials, questions, good resources