Would it be possible to make thin tentacles out of clay?

[Ultrazilla2054]

I'm trying to make an Humboldt squid, colossal squid, Dana Octopus squid,robust clubhook squid, bigfin squid, and the extinct yezoteuthis (along with other animals ofc) out of sculpty clay but I'm worried about the tentacles snapping off.  

[BlueKrono]

Learn from my mistakes: use sculpey, not clay.

[sbell]

Wire armatures will be your friend!

[Isidro]

I worked with Fimo Air, WePam and Super Sculpey. For thin structures I recommend SuperSculpey: Fimo Air is brittle and WePam more difficult to work at very fine thickness. But SuperSculpey needs to be baked, so you must ensure the position of whatever you sculpt, and ensure that the thin parts are not in contact with the surface so they don't stick and break when you try to pull out the figure.

For example I did this red-shanked douc langur, with stylized individual hairs as the beard:



Take care with the recommendation of wire. I used it as all my bird legs and the support skeleton of some of my figures. It works very fine with Super Sculpey, but with Fimo Air it oxidates strongly and it ruined several of my bird figurines. I had even to cut the tail of my homemade Dingiso, remove the wire, stick the tail again and fill the gap that the oxidation left breaking the tail all lenghtwise. My homemade scarlet ibis looks like now they have a cancer tumor in the breast, and my homemade black-and-white hawk eagle is horribly stained with oxid... Besides that, wire can't be shaped like the sculping paste, so you can't do tapering shape in the tips... But for some models, and using a non-oxidating paste such as Super Sculpey it can ve very convenient, for example look at my standardwing nightjar: