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In this lumina tutorial I will share some of my lumina tips and tricks that I’ve noticed when working with this clay.

Tip 1: Lumina Clay works really well in molds and the details of a mold even fine details press in really easily.

Here is a picture of some candies I made from a mold

There is also a trick to using lumina clay in molds though. You either have to pop out the molded piece right away. If you dont then its better if you leave it to dry in the mold. The reason is as the edges of the lumina clay start to dry out the moisture starts to concentrate in the center which can get sticky and it sticks to the mold. If you pull it out while its at that stage , the edges will put up but the center sticky piece will stick to the mold and you’ll just tear your piece apart basically. Look at the picture below to see what I mean

also if you try and pop out that piece at this wet/dry stage the center section that is not dry yet may not have all the details but as it dries the clay will again attach itself to the surface and the impression of the details will be in the clay. When its fully dry you can easily pop it out.

It takes about 24 to 48 hours to fully dry and it really needs at least 24 and the bigger the piece the longer the better so your piece doesnt mess up when you try to pull it out of the mold.

Sidenote * I made a piece about 1 1/2 inch long and about 1/2 inch thick at its widest point and I recommend about a week of drying time in a mold for it to fully dry .

Tip 2: You can make a mold from lumina clay itself haha

I dont know how this will work out yet but I’ll update it. I think I probably should have a smaller mold and maybe not with a porous object lol but well see how it turns out

UPDATE: Yes it works and the picture shows my example.

it works great with dryer clays like paper clay , stickier clays can get slightly stuck. You could put some powder in the mold to prevent sticking. I think that shallow mini molds would work the best even with sticky clays since it would be easier to get out.

That mold is about 1 inch wide by 1/2 inch thick and I let it dry about 1 week before I popped the wood tile out. This is great news that it works with porous materials , so you could probably mold anything even organic materials like leaves and it wont stick to it.

I also recommend flipping the mold over like once a day. That way you get an even evaporation rate and no major soft spots which can speed up the drying time.

Tip 3: You can punch out shapes from thin sheets of lumina clay. I was watching a youtube video made about 2 1/2 years ago by polymerclayTV when they reviewed lumina clay.

and I figured if they can punch out big shapes I’ll just punch out mini shapes to make mini sprinkles for my deco sweets creations.

Here is another video but this one is made by camille who makes beautiful flower jewelry with lumina clay. She shows how flexible lumina clay is when you wrap it around wire for necklaces to make your own cord to make jewelry.

and here are a couple of pictures I took to show the flexibility

and here is a pic of it after, as you can see there are no cracks or anything in the center of it where it was bent. Its really flexible

Here are some random pictures showing you different ways to use the clay

I made lots of sprinkles and if you want more of a hard candy look mix the clay with ink

if you want opaque chocolate looking sprinkles use acrylic paint

oh and lumina holds it shape in 3D objects as you can see in the bow I made below. The loops hold the shape really nicely

and here is a rose I made

the pics shows the tranlucent petals and how perfectly it holds it shape as well.

TIP: Lumina only shrinks like 1% to 5% and it can darken maybe like 1 shade or in thinner layer the shade doesnt change at all.

TIP: Heating Lumina – so the package says to not allow lumina near flames and high heats and as always I ignore all suggestions so I can see what happens haha. So I put lumina in a small portable oven I have at 350 degrees , the temperature was probably lower since the mini oven temp isnt stable and it was the highest setting I have on it. Anyways …. so what happens? first it was a molded piece so it had a shape to it and when heated it gets really soft. It doesnt melt or burn at all just gets squishy and I guess it would actually be good if you had a piece you wanted to reshape. You cant turn it into a new shape since the outer “skin” is there but for example you could stretch it , turn it left or right, curve it a bit. Once taken away from the heat it cools in a few seconds so your adjusted shape will remain.

Now I wanted to see how the inside looked. So I sliced it open and inside it developed little holes in it which reaffirms my theory that it has some sort of thermo plastic kind of like perler beads which can develop holes when heated too much with the iron. The good thing is with those tiny holes it totally looks like bread haha so yayy to making miniature bread with lumina clay. The only thing is that the plastic look of lumina the mini bread might look fake. My solution to that would be if you saw in my lumina coloring tutorial that when mixed with ink the clay develops a powdery surface residue. That might work out really well with making bread and with the powdery residue on top the clay wont look like plastic and it will look like bread woo hooo. I love it when mistakes turn into a brilliant new technique. Now I just gotta buy me some more lumina clay since I ran out. sigh my excitement just went down like 8 notches realizing I have no clay to test this out lol I’ll update when I get some more.

Tip: Lumina says its waterproof, but I dont know if for instance you could make aquarium toys out of it. I think its waterproof in the sense that if caught in the rain it would be okay. Or if you made jewelry and somebody jumped in the pool or in the ocean it would be fine. I will be testing it out for its waterproof capabilities and then I will update this section with my findings.

Tip for Slicing and Caning: Lumina has the potential to make canes but it can take alot of work and patience. First lumina does not stick to itself very well so you have to keep rubbing water on the surface to get it to stick to itself. I tried to make a simple strawberry cane and it actuall looked okay.

* I forgot to take a pic of the cane itself but I’ll post pic of the slices later.

Now when slicing lumina it can leave jagged rough edges. I think this happens because of luminas rubbery texture the resistance from it doesnt allow for a clean slice. This can actually be good if making things like fruit in which a clean slice would make it look fake. I do like the translucent nature of lumina for making fruit canes and rough edges because it can make it look really realistic.

* now that I just posted the picture below it looks a bit more like an eraser haha but still not too bad with a bit of tweaking it can easily look better.

Would I cane again with it? hmmm maybe but I think I would prefer making the individual slices rather than a cane just so that I can get it to look exactly how I want.

I dont think it would work really well with other canes that need a clean slice or with canes that need alot of details. Although once stuck together the canes reduce easily , the issue is getting it to stick together in the first place.

I hope these tips are helpful and if you have any questions let me know.

Also make sure to check out my other lumina clay tutorials

PART 1: LUMINA CLAY REVIEW
PART 2: LUMINA CLAY COLORING TUTORIAL
PART 4: Lumina Waterproof Experiment

Tags: clay, lumina