Gourd Animals that look realistic! Amazing!
Let’s explore how to make gourd animal sculptures using Apoxie Sculpt. Our expert is Cara Bevan. She will share her techniques with us on how to make realistic animal and bug! She is so fun to watch work her magic!
Cara Bevan is wild about animals! Insects, snakes, wild ones, and those who live with her in Trinity, North Carolina on an animal rescue farm and nature preserve. She has two cats and a crazy parrot of her own along with the family farm animals. She’s surrounded by countless wild animals as well, meaning she’s never truly alone.
Cara’s gourd animals benefit from her personal approach to life
Yet Bevan describes herself as a loner. Having undiagnosed OCD, since childhood, she embraces the ability to remain focused on meticulous details for long stretches. And, after all, nature is nothing if filled with tiny details
“My favorite part is the details — the tedious, tedious details,” “I was the kind of kid that glued and taped everything together,” she says. “I was doing strange, inventive things.
Even her time working is detailed.
“I have a notebook where I record starting and stopping times when I work,” she says. “At the end, I calculate and say ‘OK, this sculpture took this amount of time. Some smaller pieces might take three or four hours, other larger pieces take 20 to 30 hours, and there are elaborate projects that take 70 hours or more.”
Gourd animals Become her central focus
She began painting animals and mastered the textures and forms using acrylic paints. She began her artistic career right after high school painting realistic animal portraiture. In 2007 she created her business, “Art from the Heart”, later renamed “Cara Bevan Fine Art.” Her Grandmother introduced her to gourds and together they began to grow them. Their shapes reformed in her mind as animal bodies and she realized her animals could become 3D media. Now that gourd animals have become a central part of her work as a sculptor, Bevan has a new studio and a greater space for what she calls her, “gourd hoard.”
Cara’s business is mostly online and she has several products available. Her website is https://www.carabevan.com/
How you can connect with her and buy her gourd animal
You can follow her on her Facebook page and watch her short videos at https://www.facebook.com/CaraBevanArt/videos
And she has an Etsy store and sells some great tutorials at www.etsy.com/shop/CaraBevan
How to make gourd animal sculptures
Cara’s Process for making her gourd animals
Want I want to share with you is the technique she has developed for creating her clay and gourd animals. I think her use of Apoxie Sculpt is learnable from her videos. She begins with a drawing from a photograph. Then creates an armature with a gourd and sometimes wire and adds body parts with Cosclay which is a polymer clay that can be found on Amazon.
Then she covers the armature with Creative Paperclay. (Seen in white.) She waits for the paperclay to fully dry and warns that if you put it on too thick it will crack. But once dry, it is hard and the Apoxie Sculpt sticks to it beautifully.
She then uses the Apoxie Sculpt to create the textures like feathers, scales, fur and fold lines. This clay holds to the paperclay and strengthens the entire armature. Later she will add glass eyes and acrylic paint.
How to make gourd animal sculptures using Apoxie Sculpt.
She then uses the Apoxie Sculpt to create the textures like feathers, scales, fur and fold lines. This clay holds to the paperclay and strengthens the entire armature. Later she will add glass eyes and acrylic paint.
Creating Feathers on an Owl
Watch one of her best videos on how she creates feathers on an owl. She shares her trick for forming individual feathers.
How to make gourd animal sculptures using Apoxie Sculpt.
Legs are always a problem for birds.
When the clay legs are formed over the wire and completely dry, she adds small rings of clay to create the texture.
How to make gourd animal sculptures using Apoxie Sculpt.
Here turtles are also popular. A tutorial is available for these in her Etsy store. A video look at a turtle ready for paint is at
How to make gourd animal sculptures using Apoxie Sculpt.
My favorite is the way she creates koi. Here she has discovered that using a craft plastic works great for the fins! Then there is the fun of adding scales.
How to make gourd animal sculptures using Apoxie Sculpt.
Now snakes presented another texture problem. She solved it by creating a small wooden stamp that allows the texture to go on consistently and quickly. This makes the final product very realistic!
How to make gourd animal sculptures using Apoxie Sculpt.
Another gourd animal takes shape
Watch as this dragon went from wire to a realistic animal.
Her most famous gourd animal!
I taught one year at the South Carolina festival and Cara was there also teaching. All of my students were telling me about Cara’s giraffe. I was so impressed I was delighted to be introduced to her and we shared some teaching tips.
Her life-size baby giraffe is made from gourds braced by PVC pipe. “Amahle Sanaa the Masai Giraffe” is 5 ft 5 inches tall and is made of gourds, paper mache, and 45 pounds of clay. I see is for sale in her store for $6500, Take a closer look through this short video
Then there is the baby elephant! Life-sized (40″ long, 32″ tall) made from 26 gourds, wood, foam, paper mache’, 40lbs of paperclay, taxidermy eyes, and horse hair. Painted with acrylics. Donated to the NC for their benefit auction, 2012. See a video and more about this sculpture on her web site.
Here are additional pictures of her work where technique shines and hopefully will inspire you.
Cara Bevan may have been made for the kind of ultra-detailed, nature-based, animal-centric artwork that she creates. She has also successfully created a business selling her painted gourds, animals paintings and her animal gourd sculptures. Pretty good for a shy and quiet person!
Cara is one of our special gourd artists who has set new boundaries for the gourd art world in the area of sculpture. The dedication to accurate detail has created new techniques and tools we all can use.
As the creator of art, Bevan says she’s benefited from the almost meditative focus that the work requires of her.
“I still do have that appreciation of animals,” she says. “The art has helped me appreciate it more. Being around animals started the fire.”
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