A Chinese artist who can turn small lumps of polymer clay into realistic sculptures of celebrities and regular people has been getting a lot of attention on social media for his amazing skills.
The unknown artist behind Pandahappyed, an online service that allows people to order hand-made polymer clay dolls modelled after celebrities, loved ones or even themselves. According to the site’s “about us” section, Pandahappyed turned into a commercial service after the artist’s friends kept asking him to do custom projects that gave him confidence that there might be some real demand for skills such as his.
The main marketing technique of Pandahappyed is posting timelapse videos on social media, like Instagram, where his short clips get hundreds of thousands of views. And watching just one of them is enough to understand why people find them so impressing. The artist starts out with a small ball of polymer clay that he gradually moulds into a realistic models into a miniature version of his inspiration.
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Pandahappyed takes custom orders via WhatsApp and takes about a week to complete a project. After the sculpting is done and the client approves of the final product, the clay doll is baked at high temperature and then shipped to the client.
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Pandahappyed’s realistic clay sculptures remind us of the hyper-realistic clay dolls of Russian couple Anastasiya and Sergey Lutsenko, but also of the hand-made clay busts of fellow Chinese artist Yan Junhai.
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