Miniature Polymer Clay Charcuterie/Cheese Board

Welcome to my tutorial! I'll show you how to make a charcuterie board with salami, prosciutto, various cheeses, and grapes, with polymer clay. I made it in approximately 1/18th scale, USD penny shown for scale.

Materials:

• Thin Balsa Wood, small piece (~1" x 0.5")
• Polymer Clay (red, light pink, white, purple, various yellows and oranges)(I'm using cheap offbrand)
• Clear nail polish (opt)
• Acrylic paint, any shade of brown
• Superglue (another glue can be used if preferred)

Tools:

• Toaster Oven or Oven
• X-acto Knives
• Tissue Blade/Razor
• White ceramic tile (optional, but extremely recommended)
• fine tip tweezers
• Assorted items (paintbrush, potholder, etc)

Use an x-acto knife to cut a small piece of balsa wood/craft wood. You can use any shape you'd like for your board, but I choose a simple rectangle that is about 1/3" by 1". I lightly rounded the edges to get rid of stray splinters.

Water down any shade of brown acrylic paint and brush it on to stain the board. A solid coat of any other paint shade would be fine too!

If you optionally want a varnished/shiny look to the wood, use a wood varnish, gloss mod podge, or clear nail polish as a top coat once the paint is fully dry.

I'd recommend doing all the clay work on a single clean white 4"x4"ish ceramic tile. If you don't have this accessible, work on a small sheet of parchment paper to make baking easier later.

Grab the red, pink, and white clay. Roll thin, short snakes of each color and bundle them together randomly, using only a few pieces of white. Cover this tube with a thin coat of red clay and roll it out to be very thin (see last picture). This will be a salami cane for later after baking.

Pinch off around half an inch of the salami cane to use in the next step.

Using the leftover clay from the salami that we removed in the last step, flatten and stretch the clay like the picture shown. A clay rolling pin can help but isn't necessary. This will be our prosciutto later.

The reason we want to use a ceramic tile for the work surface is that we don't need to disturb that delicate clay before baking, we can leave it stuck to the tile as is.

This is a very quick step. Pinch off the tiniest possible pieces of purple clay and roll them into balls under your finger. Move them aside to make room for the next step.

Find any clay that you think are good colors for cheese, this is quite a range. Make a small ball and flatten them into a cheesewheel-like shape. This should be around a half inch or slightly bigger across, and 1/8th to 1/4th of an inch thick.

Use a tissue blade to cut crisscrossing lines in some of the cheeses, so that there are small squares cut into the circle. Use an x-acto blade to cut the other wheels into triangle wedges.

If you've been working on a ceramic tile, you don't need to move anything from where it's been flattened and cut.

Place all of your clay pieces into an oven, for the recommended time and temperature given on your packaging. (Most clays are around 260 deg F for 10-15 min at this size). A convention/toaster oven is much quicker and easier than a full size one.

The ceramic tile can be placed directly into the oven. If you don't have one, parchment paper and a baking sheet is fine.

Make sure to use safety equipment when removing it from the oven and let the clay cool before proceeding.

Salami:

Use a sharp x-acto knife to cut thin slices of the salami cane, which should now have a cross-section that looks like cured meat.

Prosciutto:

Use either an x-acto knife or tissue blade to cut thin strips into the prosciutto pieces.

Cheese:

Use either knife to re-cut the existing slices from step 5 in the baked cheese and break it up into cubes and wedges.

Spread superglue on small sections of the board at a time and use fine point tweezers to place all the components made so far. I'd recommending using tape (2-sided is best) to secure the tray from shifting.

The grapes look best when placed in a bunch-like heap. As far as the meat and cheeses, you can use my layout as a ref, but the rest of the arrangement is up to your personal preferences! Make sure you secure all of the pieces with additional liquid superglue if any seem loose.