Christmas Crib clay figurines
76Christmas Cribs and Crib Figurines
Christmas Crib Figurines and Pasturi are fun to make. I have made one set so far of small stand alone statues or figurines measuring roughly 5 inches in height, sometimes a little more or a little less. They are made to represent the characters that are usually found in a Christmas Crib (Presepju). The set contains 17 persons and 12 sheep. The sheep are standing and some are lying down and they are only 3 cms. The main characters include Baby Jesus lying in the manger, the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, the 3 Magi, an Angel of Goodwill, a shepherd tending his flock, another shepherd asleep, yet another broadcasting the good news, a person walking with a lantern, yet another carrying firewood on his back, a woman walking with a package on her head and of course the Cow and the Donkey.
In fashioning the crib figurines (pasturi) one can be as creative as one likes. For example I have made the sleeping shepherd almost naked to show the muscles although Christmas comes in December. The figurines are made in terracotta clay which becomes brown when dry. Instead of painting them I dyed their faces, hands and feet with a mixture of blue clay and water to make them greyish, thus giving them an antique look - brown all over with paler faces, hands and feet. At the same time this saved me the trouble of painting them in various colours. As can be imagined these figurines require much patience and hard work, because you are working on a very small subject, faces of less than 1 centimeter square and the same regarding the hands and the feet.
I do not bake the figurines but just let them dry naturally by leaving them exposed to room temperature for some days.
More Pictures
To see more photos of Nativity figures, other sculpture of clay busts and other information about tools and how to prepare blue clay for sculpting, please go here:
http://hubpages.com/hub/clay-sculpture-and-christmas-crib-figurines
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Comments
Same here. We used to put up the Nativity crib every year as early as 8th December. It's hard to forget the beautiful things that we grow up with. Most of the boys in our street used to build a crib, some of them with stones that we used to find and carry home from the fields.
We also used to cut bagfuls of wild thyme, a plant which is now protected (and a good thing too). The wild thyme resemb les a small tree so our cribs were always very artistic and they smelled great too. On the floor of the caves we used to spread fine yellow sand which we used to gather from the floor of real caverns in the countryside.
It looks like a lot of detail goes into this craft! I love nativity sets and think other people would really enjoy them too. You should think about selling them :)
yes, Songbird. I do them as a pastime. If I get an order i'll happily sell a set. I'm starting another set to be ready for this Christmas.
Princessa says:
5 weeks ago
I remember when I was a child, it was always a big event the day when we put up the nativity set.