May 16, 2021 Design lessons

To all my fabulous readers: I apologize for not having a post last week and for the lack of much of one this week as well. I am overwhelmed and exhausted as the first half of this month has been a rough one.

Still struggling with the loss of our brother-in-law and childhood friend to cancer last year, we found out last week that my baby sister is now also faced with a cancer diagnosis although the doctors are fairly positive about her prognosis. On top of this, my mother’s situation is deteriorating more rapidly although she is hanging on and literally every other member of my immediate family is dealing with some trauma or fresh tragedy aside from the bad news we’ve gotten. I spent the last two weeks in Colorado and Kansas just trying to be there for everybody. I’m back in California now but then, today, my cat, who we also found out had a large tumor just a couple weeks ago, passed away today. I wasn’t ready for that. We thought she had months, not weeks.

So, today’s image is a lesson in contrast. I’ve actually posted and blogged about this image before because I love the quote so much. The quote speaks to the same concept as yin and yang, that balance is found in the interconnectedness of opposites, that all light needs dark and dark needs light in order to be understood and appreciated.

In design that’s the concept of contrast. Dark colors make light colors seem lighter and vice versa. Rough textures emphasize the evenness of smooth textures and vice versa. The more contrast you have, the more the opposite characteristics of your colors, textures, shapes, forms, etc. stand out.

As you might have surmised, this photo is of the cat I lost today, the incomparable Cleo. She was not even a week old when we rescued each other—she was to be sent to a pound to be destroyed and I was being destroyed by depression. I was just trying to do the right thing for the innocent creature, but didn’t realize how she would change my view of my own life through the act of helping her and receiving so much love in return.

Being allergic to cats, I had planned to find her a home when she was well and old enough, but she crept into my heart. She was the friendliest and most empathetic cat I’ve known, but she also didn’t put up with any crap and ruled the dogs. And, honestly, the humans too. In like fashion, she decided not to put up with this tumor crap and left us on her own terms.

So, of course, I’m sad—heartbroken to be truthful. But it was such a wonder and privilege to have that little creature in my life that I am as grateful as I am sorrowful. And, maybe, it’s not until we feel the absence of those souls that touch us that we fully understand and appreciate the importance of their presence. That’s the contrast we find in life and death and in so much of our own lives, a contrast which we can express in our own art.

I would like to say that I will be able to continue with my posts as usual as of next week but I am honestly not sure how the rest of this month is going to go. If nothing else happens and my sister’s doctors continue to bring us hopeful news, I think I should be able to continue writing posts each weekend, but if I miss one, know that I will be back and am thinking of you.

You can support this blog by buying yourself a little something at Tenth Muse Arts or, if you like…

May 2, 2021 Design lessons

What kind of things do you do when you have had a really bad day or week or month? Sometimes we can be helped just by looking for the beauty in the world. That has been my solace this week.

It’s just been a rough week for me and my family and I’ve heard a few too many stories from friends who are having a hard time as well. It’s almost like 2020 hasn’t ended quite yet. So, when I sat down to work on this blog, all I wanted to do was find something to feed my spirit. As a result, I decided to look through images of artwork I’ve collected and find pieces that I find particularly beautiful.

The necklace here, by Kaelin Cordis, is the piece I decided to post as a representation of my idea of beauty. No, it’s not polymer but, as you know if you been with me a while, I don’t think, as a polymer artist, we should just look at polymer. There is so much inspirational artwork in all types of mediums that can spark ideas for us as well as help us understand and appreciate different types of beauty.

I don’t know that anyone’s been able to identify why some people find one thing beautiful and others find the same thing dull but I find it very interesting that each of us can be mesmerized by a beauty that only some of us see. For instance, although I think most people will be able to see beauty in this piece, I am certain that a lot of you would’ve chosen pieces to epitomize beauty that are much different than this. So, what is it in the pieces that we choose that defines our idea of beauty?

To me, the beauty in this piece is in the movement created through the use of lines and edges. I am also drawn to simplicity and although this isn’t a super simple piece, it is not complex, certainly not in terms of color. Accented only by the blue stone, the particularly white silver reins in the energy from the movement with its absence of color, conveying a calm and grace that I find entrancing.

When I think about the artwork that I have always been drawn to, the principle of movement in the form of curvilinear lines and shapes is almost always present. I think there is also a dominance of limited color palettes. Although it was not difficult for me to come up with that conclusion, I’m not sure I really recognized the root of my aesthetics before writing this just now. It’s interesting what we can learn about ourselves when asked just the right questions.

So, do you know what primarily defines beauty for you? If that’s not something you have defined for yourself, consider looking around and see if you can find the elements, principles, or compositions that you are most drawn to. Not only will it give you the opportunity to exercise your design knowledge, but you may find that spending time with beauty will refresh your mind and spirit as well.

You can support this blog by buying yourself a little something at Tenth Muse Arts or, if you like…

April 11, 2021 Design lessons

Big bold earrings in polymer and brass by Pavel of Handmade by Tarja on Etsy.

Does the question of how big to make a piece just flummox you? When we were doing the giveaways last month, many commentors asked about size, particularly about how to determine what size to work in, It’s a great question. So, let’s go over the decision-making process for size.

If you’ve been a reader for a while, then you know this statement is inevitable: Choosing size should be based on fulfilling your intention. Sort of. Although I usually push you to consider intention in terms of your expression or creative goals, there are other factors that also play a role in this decision.

Yes, every design decision should reflect your creative intention, but size is also a consideration of construction, wearability, feasibility, and the end user’s preferences. So, I’d like to propose two general approaches to determine size—put your creativity first or put your market first. You choose what works for you.

Putting Your Creativity First

So, are you one of those that makes jewelry for giants? That’s great. There is nothing wrong with big jewelry. In fact, if you pick up any art jewelry book, you’ll notice that much of the jewelry is so huge it would be quite uncomfortable to wear for any length of time. So why is it still considered jewelry?

Big, uncomfortable art jewelry is created with the artist’s expression and ideas being dominant not the comfort of the wearer. These pieces coexist with the human form to relay a particular message. Without a body to adorn, the work would diminish in meaning or impact. So, the artist was either not concerned with its wearability or was purposely making it uncomfortable to drive home a point. That valid. And intentional. They put their creative concepts first.

Mariyana Avramova created this huge necklace to move with the whole body, not just the neck.

What you have to say, and your process, is as important, if not more important, than the end result. I know we tend to think our studio time is about creating finished work, but is it really? Can the joy of creating be equal to, if not greater than, the value of the finished piece? If so, then your consideration for size comes down to what you need to express or create what you want.

I think if you continuously make large pieces, then that must be where your creativity wants to take you. Sure, it could be because bigger pieces can be easier to work with and you have more space to embellish and play with surface design, but what’s wrong with that? Just check that your design choices make sense with that size and your intention for the piece.

It’s true that big jewelry is not for everybody, but if that’s what you want to make, and you intend to sell it, then you need only to find the market that wants that kind of work. Look at how big those earrings are in the opening image. All her earrings are that big or bigger, and she’s sold thousands of them. She found her market and so can you.

If you make decor that is too small or too large to be functional, so what? Do you make wall pieces that are far smaller than most people would hang on a wall? I bet somebody out there would. You can also make multiples and sell them as collections to be hung together. The bottom line is, if your muse takes you there, I think you should keep exploring it.

I know we are often inclined to create work based on what the majority of people seem to prefer, but remember, you aren’t the majority of people. The majority already have a lot of choices anyway. Make what gets your heart singing.

Creating for Your Market

Now, if you create primarily to sell work and put food on the table (or to buy more materials even), you may want to consider size in terms of the wearability or usability of your pieces for the sake of your sales before, or in addition to, what your muse wants you to make.

If you make wall pieces, sculpture, or decor, your consideration of size will probably revolve around pricing since you won’t have the issue of comfort that adornment has.

For instance, if you’re inclined to make enormous pieces, you will probably need to price them higher because of material and time involved. Will your market pay those prices or can you find a market that will? If not, what can you make that still expresses your creativity but can be priced at a more acceptable level?

Whatever you do, don’t price yourself low just so you can sell it. Value yourself and your work! You can always put an expensive piece on sale if you really need to sell it. Remember, you can always discount your prices, but it is very difficult to raise them.

If you have the option, it’s often best to make smaller, reasonably priced pieces and large, impressive pieces. This way, you can draw people into your booth, online shop, or website with the large, impressive pieces while giving those with smaller budgets something of yours they can afford.

Now, I’m not saying that the size of jewelry and its pricing doesn’t have a similar consideration at times. With jewelry, it’s often as much the complexity of the work as the size that affects people’s perception of its value and how much they are willing to pay. However, a range of sizes as well as price points is a very sensible approach unless, of course, very large a very small pieces are what your signature style is about.

Overcoming Limitations

We all do it. We make our pieces based on the size dictated by our tools or materials. In some cases, it can’t be helped. There are limitations we have to work with because of physics, finances, or our studio situation. But what you do want to avoid is making size decisions based solely on what you have on hand when you could have other options.

Really, in art or any type of creativity, you should decide what you want first and then find what you need to make it happen. This is true of everything from material to tools to size.

Even if you’re not sure what you’re going to make when you sit down, you can at least determine some generalizations about whether it’s going to be a necklace or wall piece or sculpture, right?

You could also determine what you want to do with the piece when you’re done. Is it for you, a friend, family, or are you going to sell it?

Carol Simmons made these tiny bowls for a swap. They had to be a specific size, so her choice of canes and the size of the slices was dictated by the size of the bowls.

If it’s for you or friends or family, what size do you or they prefer? If you’re going to sell it, and you want to take the market approach to deciding size, what does your market want or what do you need to fill in your gaps in inventory?

If you are going to let your creativity determine size, how big do you need it in order to express what you want?

Making these decisions before you start exploring can give you some direction, right? Even though you don’t know what you’re making or maybe even what techniques you want to use, size can give you a broad jumping off point.

For instance, if you want to create a small piece with hand tooled texture, delicate pin tools would work wonderfully. But if you’re making something big, you can confidently pull out a selection of bigger ball stylus tools.

If you’re thinking you would like to go bigger than any cutters you have on hand would allow, put those cutters away and hand cut your work.

If you would like to make a wall piece bigger than your 10” X 12” toaster oven space, then figure out what it will take. Use your kitchen oven with your work securely enclosed so you contain any fumes. Or buy a bigger countertop oven or a cheap used electric stove and put it on the porch or in the garage. You can also create your piece in sections and put them together after they’re cured.

You know the old adage—If there’s a will, there’s a way.

If there’s a certain size piece you want to make but polymer doesn’t seem feasible because of the amount of polymer needed or strength issues, use another material. I know, sometimes that doesn’t seem possible because of the additional skills, tools, or material costs, but consider what is possible before simply giving into the limitations of what you have and are familiar with.

So, was that the talk on size you thought you might get? I know, we could have talked about how your choices communicate different emotions or we might have discussed standard sizes for pendants or bracelets or bathroom wall pieces. But the fact is, there aren’t really standards in art, are there? We make what we need based on our muse or market. The important thing is to stop and consider the options and make a determination based on those considerations.

So, make jewelry for giants if you want or bowls too small for anything but a mouse’s meal. As long as it makes sense for you, your muse, and your market, then it’s the right size.

You can support this blog by buying yourself a little something at Tenth Muse Arts or, if you like…

March 21, 2021 Design lessons

When asked about your thoughts on contrast in your work, do you think about your range of contrast or whether your work has high contrast? How about when asked about color saturation or texture?

When talking about concepts that are representative of a range of possibilities in design—contrast, saturation, size, texture, etc.—we often think of those terms as representing one end of the range of possibilities, or maybe more precisely put, what we think is the better outcome. By doing so, though, we may be cutting ourselves off from other wonderful possibilities.

Let’s look at contrast as our example. I think most people assume that with contrast, the broader or bigger the differences the better. It’s true that higher contrast creates more visual energy, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. As always, it goes back to your intention. If you want a piece to be calm or dreamy, high contrast and high energy is not going to relay that very well. Sometimes, subtlety is what’s called for.

Look at the bezeled polymer cabochons in the opening image by Phyllis Cahill. The highest contrast we have here is with those white spots against the pale colors. The evenness of the bezels edge does contrast against the irregular lines in the polymer but that’s also fairly subtle. The cool feel of the color palette borders on warmth as the greens turned yellow but that barely registers. Still, there is some energy in these, in part from the subtle contrast but mostly in the way the element of line shows movement where the watercolor she uses spreads from one section to another. Overall though, Phyllis used elements in simple and subtle ways and it works wonderfully.

Subtlety doesn’t come just in the form of general design elements either. Being subtle is also a choice when using imagery. Creating literal and clear translations of imagery can be beautiful but it leaves less room for the viewer to insert their own thoughts, interpretations, and experiences. Blurring lines, merging shapes and leaving out details allows us to fill in the rest with our own recollections.

I’ve always admired Lorraine Vogel’s work for this reason. She works a lot with floral and leafy imagery but you rarely get the whole flower or the whole leaf. What you do get is elegantly minimalized, inviting you to stay and fill in the rest with your own imagery.

So keep your range of options in mind. When thinking contrast, consider how much energy you want the contrast to add to a piece. When considering color saturation, keep pastels and neutrals in mind. When choosing textures, of course you have many types but even a particular type can be lightly textured if that will better fulfill the intention. And when contemplating imagery, ask yourself how detailed it needs to be.

In other words, it’s not, “Do I have enough contrast, saturation, detail…?” The question is, “How much do I need or want?

The thing is, I’m sure we all know we have these ranges of choice, but do we contemplate the full range when we are working? Sometimes we just need a reminder to look at all our options and, maybe, challenge ourselves to work outside our norm.

Last Week’s Giveaway

Okay, we have another winner to announce from last week’s giveaway!

This last week’s randomly chosen winner was Nicky Moxey! She’s in the UK so I’m sending her a gift certificate. We’ll just have to have another giveaway next month to give that clay away.

I have to point out a fabulous comment Nicky made regarding the work she’s been doing on contrast in colors and thin layers of clay … “I’m making a lot of happy mistakes,” she wrote. That is the attitude! We learn more from our mistakes than our successes and often come upon some of our greatest discoveries when we “slip up”. I just love to hear comments like that!

Congrats Nicky!

This Week’s Giveaway

Thank you to everyone who took part in last week’s giveaway through comments on the post. So, once again, let’s do this!

The Goodies:

• This week I have a multi-pack set of Premo and Souffle plus a set of pearling tools (I LOVE these pearling tools!) and a two sheet texture set with 7 textures. This is worth $49 and you can’t get these multi-packs much of anywhere right now. So here’s your chance!
• If outside the US, I have a $35 Tenth Muse certificate, since it would be such a gamble to ship clay outside the US.

How to Win:

• Put a comment in the blog comments* (below), telling me what design element you think you need to pay more attention to– marks, lines, color, shapes, form, size, or texture? You can leave a one word comment or an explanation of what you want to work on with that particular element. Remember, not only are you getting a chance to win some goodies, you’re taking the time to stop and consider how to improve your own work.
• Note: It can take some time for a comment to appear if you’ve not commented before since, due to annoying spamming, I may have to approve it .

• Giveaway winners will be chosen by random—it will NOT be based on your answers.
• And let’s say you can only win once this month so we can spread the love around.
• Get your comments posted by Wednesday March 24th at midnight Pacific time to get in for the raffle.
• I’ll announce the winner here on the blog next weekend!

I’ll put together yet another pack of goodies for a giveaway in next weekend’s post, so stay tuned here!

You can support this blog by buying yourself a little something at Tenth Muse Arts or, if you like…

February 21, 2021 Design lessons

Alev Gozonar makes simplicity seem complex. With little more than lines, color contrast, and oval cane slices, she creates an energetic and tension filled canvas. The complexity comes from the quantity of the elements and the high contrast of color. Additional elements would feel overdone, busy, and probably chaotic. This sits on the edge of chaos but comfortably, giving us time to catch the half faces peeking out on every third or so cane slice. Do you recognize the focal point? It doesn’t yell “Look at me” but we land there anyway because of the sharp angle and the density of the canes in that one spot. It’s a simple focal that keeps the eye moving instead of hovering on it.

What kind of work you prefer to do? Intricate and multilayered pieces with lots going on or simple, understated pieces? Or something in between?

Although our personal preferences dictate, in large part, how busy or complex our pieces are, the concepts we are exploring should also have quite a bearing on our approach. However, what often happens is that we do whatever gets our initial thoughts down without too much wrestling with the design. More often than not, this results in pieces that are busier than they need to be.

Now, I know it sounds strange that a more complex piece would be considered the easier way to go, but the truth is, simple is difficult to do well. This dovetails into last week’s post about looking at your work in terms of what you can take out, not just what you can add to it. This time I am raising the question of how complex your piece needs to be and what should determine that.

Whether you work free-form or make intricately planned sketches, I’m sure you could save yourself a lot of frustration later on by asking yourself if the ideas, concepts, emotions, or experiences that you are bringing to the piece would be best relayed by simplicity or complexity or something in between. The work just needs a moment of your time to consider it.

Now, if you don’t know what you’re going to make when you sit down to create, you can save those questions until you recognize where you are going with your work. There is always some point at which the direction of your piece becomes apparent. It’s at that time that you would most benefit from such questions.

Let me further amend what I said above about choosing complexity. I do think we tend to go for more complexity when we think something is not working (or we aren’t sure what we are trying to do), but I also think we commonly stay within a range, a kind of comfort zone of complexity. Very few people are into the intensity and work required for really large complex pieces like Heather Campbell’s or can unearth the sophistication of simplicity that is the genius of Genevieve Williamson. Most of you probably float somewhere in between. However, especially if you’ve been creating for a while, you will have a relative range that includes your version of simple and complex creations.

Black and white and shades of gray, scratches and smooth sections, layers that move and layers that stay put all on shapes that ride between the organic and the geometric… Genevieve Williamson creates mood, energy, and grace with a dichotomy of simple elements.

So, when you are pondering the complexity or simplicity of the piece you are working on, don’t think in terms of what other people do. Look at your body of work and consider what your range is. If it’s a pretty slim range, some stretching of those creative muscles could bring about some grand discoveries.

If you’ve been a bit sluggish on the creative front, maybe now is the time to try something that runs in a more simple or complex vein than usual. Challenge yourself to go as super simple as you can or take it up a notch and layer on the complexity but with purpose. What ideas, concepts, or experiences of yours would be easier to bring out in your work if you push it one way or the other?

Does that get your creative wheels turning? If pondering this doesn’t immediately bring up some ideas, just observe the work you come across over the next week or so. Ask yourself what the simplicity or complexity of the work conveys or supports in the piece you’re are contemplating. You might come up with some surprise answers, maybe even a new view of the piece, as well as a new perspective in the studio.

You can support this blog by buying yourself a little something at Tenth Muse Arts or, if you like…