I also looked into how to be able to animate plasticine figures without them having to constantly be standing on both feet (as otherwise they fall over). I found that you need to use an armature skeleton and then you tie / screw one of the feet to the floor to stop it falling over.
So me and L tried making one, first we used untwisted 1/16" armature wire, and used sculpey for the bones. Unfortunately the wire was just too stiff and broke the sculpey when you tried to bend it instead of just bending at the joints.
Next we tried some 28 gauge florist wire but twisted to make it thicker / give it more strength, and sculpey again for the bones. This worked quite well in that it would bend at the joints rather than breaking the sculpey.
Unfortunately after covering it with plasticine, we found it wasn't strong enough to hold up the model and he would keep falling over. This is a photo of the model posed without falling over before we destroyed him (these are only tests so we didn't do much work on the body):
When taking the plasticine off the model, this broke the sculpey and it was quite annoying having to pick all the little bits of hard sculpey out of the soft plasticine.
I've now ordered some 1/32" approx armature wire from dougarts / craft mill on ebay and some Milliput epoxy putty and we will try those for the next armature test. Plumber's epoxy is one the suggested things you can use for doing the bones, Milliput seems to be similar but specially designed (or marketed) for craft purposes.
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