Paper Mache Clay Recipe The Easy Original Recipe

Hi, I'm Johnnie from ultimatepapermache.com, and I decided it's about time that I put out a new video about my original papier-mâché clay recipe. This is the same recipe that I use for all the projects in my book, Make Animal Sculptures with Papier-mâché Clay. The recipe itself went online on YouTube for the very first time 10 years ago, I think, and it's a lot of people have used it all over the world now. A lot of other YouTubers have come up with variations, and I've come up with a few variations, too. Someone recently asked me which of those variations is my favorite, and it's still this one. The very original recipe that I came up with 10 years ago, it dries really hard. You can put on a really thin, almost paper-thin layer like I did for the elephant and the lion back here, and it still is really, really strong. It replaces the traditional paper strips and paste. Now, of course, over the years, I've answered a whole lot of questions from people who have used the papier-mâché clay or who are thinking about it but aren't quite sure what is this stuff or why doesn't that work. I'm going to try to answer all of those questions in this video. So now let's go ahead and make some papier-mâché clay. It's really easy. To make your papier-mâché clay, you're going to need a couple of large bowls, a spoon, some cups to measure with, and an electric mixer. The materials that go into papier-mâché clay are Elmer's Glue All or Elmer's Clear. This is a PVA glue, so if you live in another country, that's what you ask for. It's just a white glue or PVA glue. You'll need some drywall joint compound from the hardware store or Walmart. That's where I get mine. If you're not sure what drywall joint compound is, I'll tell you that in just a minute. You'll need some white flour and you'll need some toilet paper. Now, the original recipe does call for two tablespoons of either mineral oil or linseed oil, and I didn't happen to have any today, so I just left it out. It really doesn't hurt anything, so don't go out and buy some special if you don't have any on hand. Now, the first thing we need to do is get our paper ready. I use toilet paper exclusively in part because I'm really lazy. Just as soon as it gets wet, the fibers fall apart, and that's what we really want for a nice smooth clay. What some people have done is soak newspapers for a much longer time. They soak it in hot water for maybe an hour or two, and then they put the wet newspaper and the water into a blender. Make sure that there's water in there so you don't burn out the motor. They just blend it up, and that will break apart the fibers of recycled paper. That does work. I don't happen to do it because, like I said, I'm lazy. Toilet paper works really, really easy, but we do want to measure it. We want about a cup and a quarter of wet paper, so I stick the paper in water, get it wet, press it down into a measuring cup until I get about a cup and a quarter of it, and then I go ahead and put it back in the hot water. I want all those fibers to be separated. Just swirl it around with your fingers and make that happen. Now, we don't want totally, totally wet paper in our papier-mache clay, so we do need to get some of the water out. In fact, we want most of the water out, but you have to be really careful that you don't press out too much. That can be a real problem. If you press out so much of the water that it's almost dry, it won't fall apart when you run your mixer. You'll end up with big globs and bumpy lumps in your papier-mache clay. So, go ahead and test it in your hand. Can you push it around and have it come apart? Even though most of the water has been pressed out, then you're good to go. Next, we need to add some drywall joint compound. Drywall joint compound is made for the construction industry, and it's used to cover the edges between two sheets of drywall or gypsum board, sheet rock. There's a lot of different names for it. Now, if you live in a country where they don't make flat walls like this out of plasterboard or drywall, then you won't be able to find drywall joint compound in your stores, and you'll have to just use traditional papier-mache. A lot of people ask me, can you make papier-mache clay without drywall joint compound? The answer to that is no, but you can make papier-mache, just mushed up paper mixed with a glue or paste. That's traditional papier-mache, but you can't make papier-mache clay without the drywall joint compound. Hopefully that makes sense. There's one company, the DAP company, that puts something in their formula that just doesn't work with glue. It just turns into little rubbery balls. It doesn't work at all. So, use any other brand of drywall joint compound, and the brand I use is from Walmart. We want one cup of the drywall joint compound. We want three quarters of a cup of Elmer's Glue All. Mix it on high. Keep mixing for several minutes, because you really want the mixer to tear all of the paper fibers apart, so it'll be nice and smooth. And then you start adding your flour. You're going to use the flour to make the mixture stiffer, and this is when you get to decide how stiff you want it. For instance, if you want a really thin layer, like I use when I'm covering my mass patterns, or when I want to create a hard solid surface with my first layer, I'll use a really small amount of flour to make a really thin mixture of the papier-mache clay. But when I want to add texture, or if I want to actually sculpt with the papier-mache clay, like I did with my owl, then I'll add more flour. I can mix mine using my really cheap little mixer here. I think it cost me $12. I mix it up to the point where it has half a cup of flour in there. But when I want more than that, I'll switch out the beaters to the kneading beaters. I think they're the bread mixing beaters. Some mixers don't have those, but if you do have them, it makes it a lot easier if you have a lot of flour in the mixture. Because if you don't, the papier-mache clay has a tendency to kind of crawl up the beaters and gets on the inside of your mixer, which is kind of a pain in the rear to get out. So switch it over if you can. By this point, it might also be possible simply to mix it in by hand, although that's not going to be easy. This is how I normally use it. I'll just use a knife and spread it thinly over my armature. It will dry really hard, even if you only have an eighth of an inch on there, so you don't need a whole bunch. Now one thing you do want to do, of course, is to make sure that your sculpture dries as fast as possible after you've got your form completely covered. And you can do that easiest if you put it in front of a fan, or if, well, like right now my furnace is going on, so I can just put my papier-mache clay sculpture right over a furnace vent. If you want it to be even warmer in there, you can actually create like a convection oven by putting a cardboard box in front of your furnace vent and put your papier-mache clay sculpture in there. If you don't use up all of your papier-mache clay, you can keep it very tightly covered with plastic for a couple of days. If you want to keep it for like a week, go ahead and put it in the refrigerator. And if you need to keep it longer, just put it in a container with a really tight lid and put it in the freezer. Now I do want to mention that because I invented this stuff 10 years ago, I've got probably 200 or 300 projects out on my website at ultimatepapiermache.com that uses papier-mache clay. So make sure that you go check those out. I've also got a lot of projects on YouTube. Masks, animal sculptures, you name it. They're right here on my channel at Ultimate Papier-Mache. So be sure that you subscribe. Hit the bell thingy so you don't miss the next one coming up. That's going to be real soon. I've got one that I think is going to be really fun. Now like I said, there are two variations of this recipe that I have online. One of them is the papier-mache clay without flour. And the other one is the silky smooth air dry clay recipe. So go ahead and click one of those if you'd like to see how those work. Then go make something and come back and visit me at ultimatepapiermache.com. I'll see you there.