Halloween in Lichen
October 30, 2015
Inspirational Art
I have to say, my travels have wiped me out. The long couple days on the road, along with the thin air up here in Denver and my waiting for my allergies to calm down and get re-acclimated to my kitty, has left me pretty useless, so I’m going to lean on a fellow polymer artist and fungi enthusiast, Maria Belkomor, to grace us with a collection of nature’s beauty.
We’ll get started by featuring this Halloween-themed palette in lichen. It’s unbelievable that these colors and forms were created by the pairing of two types of organisms–fungi and algae. Yes, I had to go research what lichen actually is, and Wikipedia says, “A lichen is a composite organism that arises from algae or cyanobacteria (or both) living among filaments of a fungus in a symbiotic relationship.” Confirmed through multiple other sources, it does look like lichen is fungus-possessed. Which is pretty cool. And Halloween-esque. And, in this case, really beautiful.
Maria gathered this page of fungi in nature and fungi in art last November. What a beautiful and strange thing nature is. I will never stop being amazed and awed. Go be awed as well by following this link to Maria’s little fungi festival.
And have a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow.
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Out Of Hiding: The Winter 2015 Cover of The Polymer Arts
October 28, 2015
Inspirational Art
For our Winter issue, we present to you this dramatic cover with a beautiful piece by the very talented Jeffrey Lloyd Dever. As you see here, the theme for Winter is ‘Hidden’. We’ve been super excited about this issue and got started on it early in the year, actually. There are a lot of techniques and tips in this issue. We wanted to give you a lot of juicy ideas to work on over the Winter (or while escaping the heat down in the southern hemisphere) and for the New Year.
Articles will include things to create:
–Hidden Patterns: Variations in Mokume
–Hidden Composition: Creating Unity with Geometry
–Concealed Light: Polymer LED Jewelry
–Hidden in Plain Sight: Seamless Front Closures
–Secret Spaces: Polymer Box Construction
–Hiding Loose Ends: Finishing Options for Stringing
And things to ponder:
–Of Values and Intentions: The Art of Jeffrey Lloyd Dever
–Behind the Wall: Breaking Through Artistic Blocks
–The Hidden Cost of Doing Business
–Muse’s Corner: A Hidden Polymer Pioneer
… and so much more. Due out November 22nd.
I’m still on the road here, so my apologies for the brevity of this post. I’ll get more information out in our newsletter Thursday or Friday and we’ll get pre-orders going by then, as well. We’ll confirm that here on Friday, too!
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There Be Creepy Crawlies Here
October 26, 2015
Inspirational Art
It’s almost Halloween and I had been considering a dark beauty theme this week, but the real world has, as it so often does, presented me with another source of inspiration for this week. It is no less frightful, though, let me tell you.
Here in California, where I spend about half my time, we have found ourselves in a very scary house. No, really … it’s quite unsettling here. It’s not haunted exactly, although the frightening presence within the walls, unseen for years but slowly taking over, is pretty spooky stuff. Its was revealed when this strange spongy whiteness came creeping out into a closet, taking over a stack of my dear man’s t-shirt collection and his shoe rack. An inspector came out, looking very much like a guy from Ghostbusters with his large beeping machines and funny probes, and after running them back and forth across the suspect wall, determined that, yes, the house was possessed … by a myriad number of mold types and other fungus. So, guess what is happening suddenly while I am neck-deep in editing and layout, trying to get the next issue of The Polymer Arts together? We are being run out of our house.
So, I have my mind on mold. Which brought Jasmyne Graybill to mind. She had the honor of being the very first artist featured on this blog back in 2012. Because she creates these polymer clay textures in a context in which we see it as an unwanted growth, it appears rather disgusting to us. But look closely at this plate. If you recreated that texture on a bracelet or as a constrained band around a vase, we’d think it were quite lovely. So, it’s not the texture that is inherently repulsive, it’s just our knowledge of what it represents. Beautiful textures can be found in even the creepiest of natures organisms.
I am presently trying to see the beauty in the natural organisms that are invading the house, but I have to say, even though I do find beauty in all forms of decay, I have now come to terms with the fact that I do still prefer it stay outside and away from our apparel, at the very least.
That is my spooky-themed story right now, and as soon as I finish writing this I must get back to boxing things up so I can move operations back to Colorado tomorrow. So I’ll be on the road tomorrow and Wednesday, but by then we should be ready to reveal the Winter issue’s cover. It’s quite dramatic if we do say so ourselves. Stay tuned for that not-so-spooky installment of “The Polymer Zone”. And if you find yourself attracted by the beautiful fungal texture here, take a look at Jasmyne’s collection on her website.
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Variation on Owls in Autumn
October 23, 2015
Inspirational Art
You may recall a certain blog post at the beginning of the year with a clever necklace much like the one you see here but white and with a barn owl. Well, that wasn’t the only owl necklace of that kind she created. She took that and created a very lively variation on the design.
Now, I usually wouldn’t post the same type of design twice in a year, but there is something to be said about seeing how an artist stretches a great design. And it goes with our Fall color palette theme. And it’s really beautiful. So …
If you didn’t see or don’t recall the first post on the owl necklace design by Dorota Kaszczyszyn of VaniLlamaArt, you can jump back to it by clicking here before we go any farther. See how the structure is the same but she’s opened things up and moved from a minimal neutral palette to something wonderfully rich. The use of Skinner blends throughout gives a liveliness to the creature, with the illusion of light hitting what would be its shoulder wings and that blue on the body echoed on the end feathers. It’s a beautiful departure from the tight, stylized design of the first, which is equally stunning but with a different feel.
She has also recently created a metallic owl to add to her family which goes in the very opposite direction being very stylized and all silver. You can jump to this page on her blog to see all of them but do dive into the posts as well, especially the one on the piece we are looking at today as she reveals how she designed and created the smooth transition in Skinner blend beads. Click on the image to go directly there.
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Autumn Stone
October 21, 2015
Inspirational Art
Is it just me, or do the dark colors of autumn seem so much more dramatic than any other season? I’m not knocking the spark of those first Spring flowers or the brilliance of a sunny mid-summer meadow, but the brightness and purity of those colors are beautiful and cheerful while Autumn’s palette speaks of deep emotion and, well, drama. At least to me. Life is not all bright and cheery and I think that is something we actually need. The tempered days of troubled thoughts and the rough patches we experience are what truly make us appreciate the good times. Life is for living and it’s one bumpy ride. But even the bumpy times can be beautiful.
Similarly, days like those in Autumn, with the foliage falling away, plants returning to the ground, and the days getting shorter, have their own wonderful beauty. The idea of beauty even in the process of decay has always interested me, so it’s no wonder Klavdija Kurent‘s liquid crystal stone caught my eye as I scoured for more Autumn palettes. The technique itself is gorgeous with the translucency of the shuffled layers, but also the colors in those reds, rusts, oranges and creams are so vibrant when juxtaposed. The play of this almost monochromatic palette is where the drama comes from. The many textures of this piece add to its drama and impact as well.
This image is from a promotion for a class Klavdija had last month in which she taught this liquid stone and a liquid rust technique. Hopefully she’ll teach this again in some fashion that might allow us in on her secrets. In the meantime, you can look at more drama and fun pieces on her Flickr and her blog.
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Fall into Autumn Colors
October 19, 2015
Inspirational Art
Well, it’s finally cooling down here in California, where I’ve been bouncing around the last several weeks, and I realized that I haven’t seen any Fall-like scenes yet. In Colorado, of course, we have some wonderfully dramatic color changes in our mountains and trees, but I’ve missed that. So, mid-season and a bit past-peek for Fall colors in much of the country, I want to delve into some of the richness a Fall palette provides.
This set of earrings is a classic example of the deep greens, rich rust reds, and brilliant yellows nature shows off this time of year. I found these on Livemaster.ru in the shop that the Google translator says belongs to Nina Kotlyarevich (I don’t trust the translators, especially when it comes to putting an English version of a name up, but the address on the photo goes to Nina’s shop so we’ll assume it’s close).
Such patience she must have to apply such tiny detail using those thin snakes of clay and little dots. The resulting texture is lovely and takes the simple autumn leaf design several steps beyond the norm.
The dense texture with thin clay snakes is something Nina looks to have done a bit of. She has some amazing pieces in her shop right now including an ancient ivory looking box with swirling and finely dotted detail that will make you hunger for a closer look. Which you should do.
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Dedicated to Zen and Stones
October 16, 2015
Uncategorized
This week, we’ve looked at work that showed a couple of artists pushing themselves in form and repetition. The use of repetition can have an exciting and energized look or it can be calm and grounding. But for the artist creating it, it is often a doorway to the sometimes elusive state of what is often referred to as flow. It’s that time when you are so enthralled and engrossed by what you are doing that you completely lose track of time, of where you are, and sometimes what exactly you are doing. It’s a fantastic state to reach because it means that the work you are doing is satisfying your many sides. This kind of work is challenging enough to keep your attention, interesting enough to basically mesmerize you, but is not frustrating or tedious so you can relax and enjoy the process.
This little bit of insanity you see here is just such a process for Elspeth McLean, an Australian living in Canada and a self-proclaimed “Dotillism” artist. According to an article published on the Mother Nature Network, creating art is her form of meditation and these mandala stones are at the heart of that process for her. The joy and dedication she gets from her work is so readily apparent that the poor girl is overrun with requests for these beautiful stones.
Images of these stones went viral recently, and now Elspeth has been forced to do something rather different from most Etsy sellers–she releases the sale of her stones only on certain days and during certain hours, just a couple of times a month, with many selling instantly and all selling out, it appears, within the day. What a problem to have! The colorful and zen-like beauty of the stones can also be found in her dotillism paintings. However, there is something to the centered patterns of the mandala stones that really draws your eye and pulls at something deeply rooted in all of us. And for those of you that cane, does this not spark some ideas?
To see the short article and all the wonderful photos of her stones, go to this page on MNN.com. You can admire her illustrations and photographs of her work artfully placed in nature on her website and, of course, in her Etsy shop.
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/blogs/dotted-mandala-stones-reveal-artist-vibrant-life
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Birds on the Brain
October 14, 2015
Inspirational Art
If you ever want to push yourself and test your mettle on a new design or technique, try making it over and over again. Alice Stroppel did this recently with these awesome little bird bowls. 26 times she recreated the basic design but with different canes. And, oddly enough, she thinks this may lead to her to even more bird bowls. This is what she said on her blog about them:
“I’ve been working on these bird bowls for an exchange I’ll be taking part in. In the beginning I thought I must have lost my mind to think I would ever finish 26 bird bowls. especially since several broke apart in the oven until I figured out you can’t take the bowl out and add more things and then bake again … I really have learned so much about making bird bowls so there might be more on my table soon, or maybe even a workshop at Studio 215.”
I’m very curious about why she couldn’t add pieces after the first cure. Maybe it was about how they were propped up or formed to start with. If she has a workshop on these then some of us might be able to find out! Speaking of which, she mentions her newest project there at the end, Studio 215. This is an actual brick-and-mortar gallery workshop space Alice has over in Florida. I had the pleasure of hearing about it, and some other interesting ideas she has in the works, while we were at Sandy Camp together last week. Sign up to on her studio’s website to get any and all exciting news about happenings there.
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Out of the Box Quilt-ish Clay
October 12, 2015
Inspirational Art
This last week’s conversations with various polymer friends, both old and new, seemed consistently to circle around new challenges and pushing our personal creative envelopes. If you saw Friday’s post, you got a peek at one artist seriously pushing herself with the result being the creation of a great new tool for polymer artists.
Then of course, we have the artists who want to push themselves in terms of what they are creating. Trying something new, leaving your comfort zone, and creating a challenge for yourself that makes you both nervous and terribly excited can be so invigorating for both your creativity and for your soul.
So, when I ran across this amazing and unusual quilt-ish piece by Heather Campbell, I just had to share it. Here Heather is working, as she puts it, “so out of the box for me … crazy fun!” It does look like fun but also a lot of work! Wonderful work, though.
It appears to be fabric-covered boards with polymer embellishments, mostly in heavily repeated elements. The large top image you see here is a detail, but you can get a better idea of the size and see the whole piece as it was when Heather took her progress images for her blog post. There, you can see her steps from the start to what you see here. It’s a feast for the eyes and a nice shot in the arm of color and creativity for a Monday.
We had the honor of getting a wonderful interview article on Heather for our Spring issue of The Polymer Arts, so do check that out if you can. Also, visit her site if you never have or haven’t recently and just wander through her galleries and blogs. Beautiful wall pieces and touching stories await you.
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So I spent my day at Sandy Camp in San Diego with a wonderfully enthusiastic group. I taught a mokume gane workshop with my little clayers coming up with some gorgeous results. However, I was too busy chatting and answering questions to direct my in-room photographer (thanks Mrs. Friesen!) to get some close up shots of the really wonderful color combinations and patterns that filled the tables. But what I did get, as did the rest of the lucky attendees, was a first look at a great new app created by our community’s own Nancy Ulrich. It may not seem like digital apps would have a place in hands-on craft, but this one was created just for clayers like you and me. Especially if you like color.
Well, that’s a silly thing to say. Who here doesn’t like color? But who here dreads trying to work up a color palette then figure out the color recipe for each color? If you raised a virtual hand in response to both those questions, then the ColorMixr app is going to be your new best friend! This is a purely polymer-clay-centric, color-picking, and palette-creating app. It was just released last night–it had just gone live in the Google Store hours before the demo I saw and the first Apple downloads happened by people in the room as Nancy presented it.
Here’s how it works: You take a photo, upload an image, or pick something you find online and feed it into the app . The app has little circles that will automatically pick out 5 colors to create a palette but you can also move over the image until each circle is over a color you want (see the screen shot upper left). You can also choose colors in a color wheel to adjust the color choices (screen shot upper right). Once you have your palette saved inot your palette library (screen shot lower left), tap on the palette to get a list of the color recipes for each color in it (screen shot lower right) … based off your specified brand of polymer! That’s pretty darn nifty! And know that Nancy has personally mixed and checked all 2000+ colors recipes available in this app–she even brought all the boxes of samples she made to prove it. Phew! She has been one busy lady!
We’ll be working on a review and a how-to-use-it article for the next issue, but in the meantime, download it for yourself and go play! It’s free to use for the next 30 days. If you like it, you can have this handy tool literally at your fingertips to capture any color sets you see out and about or online for a monthly membership ($3.99 with big discounts for pre-paid 6 & 12 month memberships) with regular color updates and/or new colors every week. Just search for “ColorMixr” (no ‘e’ in mixer) in the Google App store or Apple store.
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So, I came across this great little idea that I had seen some time ago but never got around to trying. Although the impression method of creating mokume patterns is pretty accessible with manufactured stamps and texture sheets, it would be a grand thing if we had some options so those standard patterns and stamps aren’t the only ones we see out there. This is one easy way to create a unique pattern—three-dimensional paint!
Anna Anpilogova shows us an example of a pattern she created using glass liner paint. Her simple explanation for this easy but dramatic DIY texture sheet can be found on her Flickr page:
You need some transparent film and liner for glass/ceramics. Just put the film over the desired pattern and trace it with the liner. Let dry, and then repeat tracing one or two times to increase the depth of the texture. Works well for mokume gane technique, just don’t forget to sprinkle it with water before applying to clay, as it tends to stick.
Some paints you can try would include Pebeo’s Outliner, Jacquard’s Luminere 3D, DecoArts 3D Enamels or even some heavy-body acrylic paints and borrowing a narrow tip applicator from something else or putting it in a squeeze bottle.
Anna is a big texture artist. If you are looking for a texture inspiration, take a look at her collection of work on her Flickr photostream and LiveJournal pages.
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I am between short, but intense, trips and have my brain quite fully embedded in the goal of teaching as I work on articles for the Winter issue and prepare for my class and first visit to Sandy Camp in San Diego at the end of this week. So, while I keep working on those items, how about a few ideas for things you might wish to explore?
All my tests and samples that I’ve been creating have produced a fair amount of scrap clay, so, of course, seeing a few cool options for using that clay catches my eye. And this process here, as outlined by Anne Idril Rohee Briere, actually overlaps into what I had planned to teach this weekend, as well as hitting on an interesting phenomenon. This technique isn’t really new but is rather a variation on, not one other technique, but varied other techniques. The cut and reveal approach to finding a pattern in clay is often referred to as mokume, but more often when it is done, it is done in layers of solid clay. Hidden magic is more traditionally done with rolled and pressed jelly roll canes while others have referred to covered layered or mixed clay that has been stamped and the top cut away as a reverse Sutton slice. I’m actually teaching a version of this as a variation for my mokume class this weekend, but I call it scrap mokume where primary layers in the mokume block are scrap separated by a solid color. They are all related in that they have a major common approach … depths of color change and slicing.
In other words, people have been, and hopefully will continue to, push the basic steps in these techniques to produce new and interesting patterns, and you can be one of those! The primary goal is to create a pattern that isn’t just a mush of color. That is what the solid layer or layers helps accomplish. Once you have that, you can stamp with a texture sheet, punch and cut your own pattern or fold and twist the clay. Then slice!
I always suggest trying a new technique as it’s been taught, then once you see how it works, that’s when your play and exploration can result in really wonderful variations. Let’s see what you can come up with this one. (You are more than welcome to send me your results, by the way. I love to see what others have made because of the posts and conversations on the blog. It helps keep me jazzed!)
See the full online tutorial here on Idril’s blog. Go ahead. It’s just playing with scrap and could be loads of fun.
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So, since we’ve been heading down a whimsical path combined with cross discipline work, and I have been holding onto this image sent to me by Jenny McKitrick for a few months already (thanks Jenny!), it seemed it was time to pull this little ray of sunshine out. Or, maybe we should say, nuclear level of sunshine!
The piece was an entry by Arianna Raffa in the Battle of the Beadsmith 2015 competition. When Jenny first sent it to me, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Busy work is not my thing, but it doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it, and the one thing this piece does that we all hope to have happen when something we made is viewed, is force you to keep looking at it in order to take in all the detail. Aside from that, I just am blown away by how much work had to go into this! Soutache, a variety of beading techniques and those huge polymer cane butterfly wings make it not only full of beads and color, but full of construction style jewelry disciplines. You can’t say Arianna isn’t talented, and you can’t say she doesn’t have some patience!
Most of this Italian designer’s work is a bit more subdued, but still glitzy and colorful. If this burst of color on your screen brightened your day, you can continue down that path with a bit of time on her website. It is in Italian and does not translate in Google, but just go to ‘Creaciones‘ and click on any of the items under the drop down menu there for a page full of color and shine.
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