Dough Figurines Making

If we google search of it, we might get confused about dough figurines making and play dough. Yes, their ingredients might used the same but they have different purpose. Play dough is actually a flour coloring dough that can let kids play around safely and no risk when their children accidentally eaten. While, dough figurines making is more towards to sculpture, they more focus on detailing, but still they using same ingredients which is flour dough.

Dough figurines making mostly can be seen in Malaysia when there are Chinese celebration such as Chinese New Year and Mooncake Festival or some older streets or cultural street. It is a bit hard to find in Malaysia but easy to find at China because it listed as a national intangible cultural heritage by the state council of the People's Republic of China in 2008.

As you can see in the pictures above, there are many kinds of them. The craftsmen sculpture different kinds of figures over the time, which is from traditional legends to cartoon characters. The differences between these two is the detailing. If they are making traditional legend characters, they use their tools to carve the facial features; while the cartoon characters, they pinch small dough and apply on the figures. After finish making the figurines, they usually display on the bamboo stick or as a keychains, sometimes they also display without both of them like a sculpture.

Usually we can see them selling at the street with their stalls or sometimes will have a section place that people can experiences making dough figurines. Actually the costs of making dough figurines is not expensive compare to clay or play-doh (it also make by dough but more expensive). Mostly children will be more attracted by dough figurines because of the colorfulness. So, the lighting towards the dough figurines' colors also quite important because they might open their stall until night time, so they need to used electrical lights such as LED, halogen, fluorescent or incandescent. Each of these lights affects the appearances of the colors differently. Halogen lights cast more closely to natural daylight ,while fluorescent light gives off a bit bluish colors ,and the incandescent light is more yellowish. So, we can see that halogen lights are more suitable when dough figurines are displaying.

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In my opinion, I believe that dough figurines would not disappear from today's society, although they might quite hard to find in daily life. There are equipment tools still sell in online shop with some dough figurines tutorial as a set of it. Still, there also have people want to learn about how to make it. So, I think that dough figurines can help people have a great sensory experiences especially children and also can gain more creativeness towards craft. Also, dough figurines can make a person happy because it cheap and not too hard to make it, the craftsmen also like to see their customers smile after having their own dough figurines.

So, I think that we can promote more about dough figurines in the future like cooperation with manufacturers or designers because I think that dough figurines is unique when it doing by our own hands and we won't make a same one compare to the previous one except of the shapes, so I think people can experiences once in their lifetime. Or we can transfer it from bamboo sticks to keychain styles so more people will interested with it.