My original vision for this shop was to cover the bay window roof with wood shingles. I therefore had stained it brown, along with the rest of the trim. However, I’ve since decided to use faux terracotta tiles instead. This meant painting the roof a terracotta color, so that the gaps between the tiles would be better camouflaged.
I made the roof tiles out of polymer clay, using almost the same method as described in my post for Gelateria Bocelli, the main difference being the type of varnish I used to seal the pastels. When I made the tiles for my gelateria, the only matte varnish I owned that was compatible with polymer clay was a brush-on varnish. There were two issues with it that caused the tiles to lose much of their rough, weathered look. First, merely brushing on the varnish was enough to rub off some of the soft pastels. And second, I found this particular brand of matte varnish to have a slight sheen (something I’ve used to my advantage in certain other projects where I actually do want a hint of sheen).
Since making those tiles six years ago, I’ve added a wonderful product to my collection of craft supplies: Helmar Crystal Kote Matte spray varnish. I use it for many of my mini baked items, when I need to seal in pastels but also want a truly matte finish. It’s one of the very few spray varnishes compatible with polymer clay. For this project, I sealed the roof tiles before gluing them in place.
Like with Gelateria Bocelli, the most finicky part was cutting the tiles to fit the triangular sections on either side of the bay window. For the gelateria, I cut the tiles prior to baking them. This wasted less clay, as I only baked the tiles I knew I’d be using. The drawback was that the raw clay did not hold its shape well while moving it around and cutting it. This time, I baked all the tiles full size and cut them to fit after baking. Baked polymer clay is easy enough to cut with a sharp blade, though I needed to make extra tiles in advance, to account for the necessary trial and error and inevitable mistakes in cutting.
