Desk Highland Cow

I've been focusing on the world of work far too much lately, so in an effort to spend more time on things that make me happy it was time to get back to some crafting. I'd worked on the initial structure of my desk highland cow a while back when I had some leftover clay from attempting to make another biscuit coaster. I'd quite enjoyed making a chocolate digestive so went for a childhood favourite next and made a malted milk. Following a very logical chain of thought, spare clay and the fact that a malted milk has a cow on it, making a miniature cow seemed the only reasonable thing to do.  

It's quite simple to make a desk animal, a bit fiddly at times, but definitely easy enough for beginners like me to have a good go at. I started out making a small rectangle out of the clay, about a fingers width, and once the edges were rounded out folded a third to be the base and the remaining two thirds to be the body. Now a cow isn't a perfect rectangle shape so for the top third of the body I made this into a rounded sort of triangle shape, and saved the small sections I had removed for later! Then with the base I split this evenly into two sections to make legs and rounded them to make the shape a bit less rigid and finally flattened the ends to make the feet.

Now to the spare clay, this was used to make arms, ears, horns, a nose and tufts of hair, this sounds like a lot but it's all quite petite so it's not as difficult as it sounds to make these pieces from leftovers. For the arms two small sausage shapes are needed, then squash one side to make it flat enough that they can be moulded into either side of the body of the cow. Next the nose, a small oval and indent two small ovals into one side and place this in the centre of the upper third of the cow. Then the ears, these are essentially raindrop shapes that need to be added on sideways to either side of the head, push in the thinner ends of the ears into the side of the cow's head and then create small indents in the wider sections, almost a slight bend, to make the ear shape. 

The finishing touches are the horns and tufts of hair, these are made in pretty much the same way and just shaped differently when adding to the final piece. I made four pieces of hair and two horns, and these are very thin rolls of clay with both ends originally made pointy, one end will be flattened to use as the side pressed into the main shape. Put the horns on first to either side of the head of the cow but quite near the top as the hair will be used to cover these joins. Then put one piece of hair in the centre of the head, joining just to the back of the head, then the next two slightly elevated compared to the first with one either side, then the final one is artists choice so I added it in a space I felt needed a little extra fluffiness. 

Painting this was nothing short of a pain, it was one of those moments where something that was once a cute idea becomes a real problem. I put it down to having an intricate design but inappropriate paint brushes. The body was relatively easy, I was a mite too carefree with the initial painting and may have gotten a bit too much of the brown on the horns, hair and nose, and it just required a few layers to cover up the fact that I had used terracotta clay. Once this had dried I did the tufts of hair a beige colour, before very carefully covering any errors on the horns with white paint, then finally the nose with a nice bright shade of pink. These all required a few layers, and probably more patience than I have been blessed with, before reaching the truly final step of glossing the whole thing over with some glue for a nice shiny finish.

Now she is finished, I think this was not a bad first attempt at all! By no means is my desk highland cow perfect, I am under no illusions that anyone would spend their hard earned money on one of these, but I made this for my own enjoyment and I can be pleased with the outcome. This gave me hours of fun while making it, it will provide hours of amusement in the future looking at my creation and as the result of my own efforts I can proudly say that I made this. A lot of the time it feels like we have to be perfect in everything we do and we need to put on a perfect appearance for the world, but to me that is madness, I am quite happy going about my day in my own way and just doing my best, so yes my cow may not be a masterful work of art suitable for global consumption but the both of us are good enough as we are and the whole point of doing this was to make myself happy so mission accomplished.