The Party is in Full Swing. Come join us!
May 31, 2023
Polymer community news, The Polymer Arts magazine news
What party is this? The latest project from little ol’ me, Sage. The Sage Arts podcast is more than up and running… I have 25 episodes up as of this posting, ready on your favorite podcast player (New to Podcasts? Click here to find out how easy it is to enjoy them!) and a new one coming out every week.
What’s This Podcast All About?
This podcast is all about feeding and exciting your muse. By enlightening or reminding you about important and maybe unconsidered aspects of creating and living as an artist, I hope to help you find more joy and satisfaction in what you do, sharing ways to create with authenticity and fearlessness, while supporting your uniquely defined version of success.
Now what the heck does that all mean? Well, let’s look at what this is and what this is not…
It IS…
… a way to consistently feed your muse
… all about you. Myself, my guests, and my guest co-hosts speak to the issues, curiousity, and hurdles that you as a creative deal with on a regular basis.
… focused on creating a more fulfilling, joyful, and meaningful artistic journey.
… a conversation that goes both ways with lots of opportunities for you to be heard.
It is NOT…
… all about polymer clay or any one medium, as it’s important stuff for all artistic folks.
… focused on “how-to” or the latest tools and materials.
… just interviewing successful artists and talking at you. Rather it is like a coffee house chat or other friendly gather and I include you, the listener, in every way I can.
I created this podcast to supercharge your creativity, motivation, and artistic style through novelty, story, conversation, and community. Everyone has how-tos and ways to increase your sales – valiant and necessary stuff, of course! But what does your muse need? What does your work and your love of your art need to thrive? That’s where I want to help.
I aim to give artists ways to further hone their unique voice, increase their joy and productivity, and create a version of artistic success that is meaningful, satisfying, and anything but ordinary.
Come Join the Conversation
If you have something to share, would like to be a guest (for a chatty interview), or be a guest co-host (you and I banter on a particular subject) drop me an email me via my contact page on the show website: https://thesagearts.com/contact/ or send a voice mail (use the red button on that same site, bottom right corner of any page.)
And join me on social media!
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thesageartspodcast/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TheSageArtsPodcast
And don’t forget to click “FOLLOW” or that little arrow on your favorite Podcast player so you get notices of new episodes. New Episodes come out weekly on Friday evenings, barring natural disasters or other bits of interference, of course. I hope you’ll join me there, on The Sage Arts podcast!
There are new artists and creatives joining every day with tons of great things to say…
“Just what I needed!”
“I just binged-listened … and I can’t wait for more!”
“There is so much validity in your presentation…”
“Looking forward to all the thinking and creating that they prompt.”
Taste test on my RSS website: https://rss.com/podcasts/thesagearts/
Or on the podcast home website: https://thesagearts.com/
Or start with this episode:
Twisted Color
June 15, 2018
Inspirational Art
Here is another example of using both color and line to create fun and energetic pieces.
Izabela Nowak is well known for her folded polymer but it looks like she has taken it a step further, away from the origami-inspired and into geometry formed from spiraling layers of polymer strips. Her color combinations tend to stay on one side of the color wheel but she doesn’t need a lot of bright or varied colors to give the pieces energy when she has these busy lines twisting back and forth around themselves. The open space in these pieces adds a light and delicate nature to her forms, lending plenty of quiet space between the strands of twisting color.
See what else she has been up to with her new forms by checking out her Flickr photostream, her Facebook page or her Instagram account.
Shaking Color
June 13, 2018
Inspirational Art
Imbuing your pieces with energetic color has a lot to do with contrast. The colors do not necessarily have to be bold and bright, although bright colors have an inherent energy of their own, but rather they need to be a mix of warm and cool, bright and muted, or any combination of color characteristics that make the colors vie for dominance, visually.
The colors in this brooch by Pavla Cepelikova have a fun combination of bright and muted as well as cool and warm colors. By themselves, they would give this piece a moderate amount of energy. Applying the colors in stripes adds to the intensity of energy as variation in color alternates up and down those striped strips.
Her use of lines also adds a tremendous amount of energy. Not unlike the way they use lines in animation to denote when something is moving, she has added energetic lines around the petals as if they are shaking on the surface of the brooch. The combination of energetic color and lines makes for a very lively piece.
This combination of line and color energy seems to be a recent exploration of Pavla’s. You can see what she’s done with it so far on her Flickr photostream and in her Etsy shop.
Detailed Color, 10% off Sale, New Books!
June 11, 2018
Inspirational Art
Things are super busy over here at TPA headquarters polishing up a brand new website. So we thought would make it busier (and because we will need to hold off on doing sales promotions on the new site for little bit) by bringing you a 10% off Everything in Your Cart Sale! The sale is good through June 14. Use the promo code TPASITE on our website.
We also have initial announcements about new books and our upcoming new website! But instead of filling up your blog post here with details, I’ll leave you with a link to our newsletter here to get all the news.
I thought we could look at busy color this week but find examples that keep it contained, manageable, and a real pleasure to view. A broad and varied colored pattern can add a lot of interest and energetic detail to a piece without being overwhelming. You just need a few points of keeping it controlled.
This pendant is by Jana Lehmann, part of a newer series of hers involving lots of color, lines and folded clay. Her patterns are further enhanced by her many little details—dots and spots and patterned borders. It is visually energetic as well as making you want to reach out and touch its very tactile surface. But for all its busyness, it is well contained within its borders and thick pendant form.
Take a look at her many variations with necklaces, rings, and brooches found on her Facebook page and Flickr photostream.
Coloring Outside the Usual
June 8, 2018
Inspirational Art
As much of a focus as Ellen and Sue have on polymer art at Creative Journey Studios, they make plenty of room for other types of beautiful craft mediums.
This work here is by one of the other craft artists they show and sell at the studio, Deb Karash, who works with metal and, surprisingly enough, colored pencil. Her reasons for choosing this combination of mediums sounds much like what many of us say about working with polymer. In her words, “drawing on metal provides a surface that is unique and can’t be achieved any other way. Colored pencil drawing allows me to blend colors and create patterns that are uniquely mine. I draw on metal because it is strong but easily formed. I create jewelry because I appreciate the intimacy of an art form that is worn on the body and that, historically, carries emotional weight.”
Her colors and forms might even impress one as polymer at first glance, making her work a possible source of inspiration for designing in polymer clay. Take a look at more of her pieces, and drink in more of her beautiful color, on her website and her Facebook page.
A Splash of Mokume
June 6, 2018
Inspirational Art
If you make it over to Milton, Georgia for the Creative Journey Studios grand reopening, you will get to feast your eyes on some new work by the likes of Barb Fajardo. I don’t know that the pieces shown here will be there but I sure would love to see these in person.
Barb’s lovely mokume slices, with their leaf-like formations and washes of delicate color, are just such a treat for the eyes. The black background and frames really make the subtle colors pop. She keeps the organic look from becoming too stolid and geometric by giving each rectangular shape a slight curve or angle. The otherwise simple shapes allow the mokume to really shine.
Barb has been having a fantastic time playing with mokume lately and has been coming up with delicious color combinations and patterns. You should really check out her other pieces on her website here as well as follow her on Facebook and Flickr.
New Homes
June 4, 2018
Inspirational Art
At the end of this week, Creative Journey Studios, the ultimate polymer-related destination and a must-have on every polymer enthusiast’s bucket list, is having a grand reopening celebration at their new digs in Milton, Georgia, just north of Atlanta. The move from Buford was a monumental project for our dear Ellen Prophater and Sue Sutherland who are at the core of this fabulous concept and place. I’m sure they are thrilled as well as relieved to finally have a home set up again for the workshops and collection of polymer arts. Creative Journey Studios houses one of the largest collections of historically relevant polymer art in the world. The collection has recently expanded as well, taking up 18 cases just stuffed with amazing artwork.
One of the newest pieces in the collection is this mosaic by Ponsawan Sila, who recently relocated herself and her daughter to Thailand from Indiana, and had to shed many of their belongings in the process. But lucky us, this beautiful piece is permanently housed with our ladies in Milton.
For this coming weekend’s grand opening, held June 5th to the 8th, there will be demos all weekend along with a trunk show for Lindly Haunani on Friday night. The gallery will be showing off new work by quite a number of artists working in both polymer and mixed media. I’ll spend this week and maybe some of next week highlighting recent work by a number of these great artists that the studio supports.
If you’re interested in attending the grand reopening, go to the Creative Journey Studios’ website for further details. If you will have to visit on another day, you may want to look at the workshop schedule and plan to attend one of the amazing workshops they have coming up, conducted by the likes of Donna Greenberg, Jana Roberts Benzon, Julie Picarello and more. Go to this page for the workshop schedule.
A Painterly Cane
June 1, 2018
Inspirational Art
Here’s one last example for this week of these incredible illustrative image canes we are seeing these days. This one uses the more familiar and common imagery of flowers which so many cane makers are inspired by. However, the way Jayne Dwyer creates her flower here makes it look like a painting, with color variation and details that are not very common in polymer clay flower canes.
Jayne employees outlining, which we saw at work in Claire’s piece on Monday, but here it is quite a bit more dramatic with its black and white outlines. The soft gradation of color plays a contrast to the hard black-and-white delineation around the flower. It makes it really pop. She also created a painterly background for the flower within the cane itself. The streaks of color are varied but create radiating lines that give an energized, dimensional feel to the petals.
And then she has these spots of color that pop up within those gradations. It’s very detailed and interesting to look at closely and imagine all the decisions she made to come up with this image. I don’t suppose the decisions are much different than one would make when painting, but in polymer, each decision takes some serious confidence and dedication to the image since how it will look is not going to be wholly apparent until after reduction.
Take a close-up look for yourself at the image in this cane or go to a bigger image on Facebook. You can also see more of the work Jayne does on her website.
A Fascinating Process
May 30, 2018
Inspirational Art
I know a lot of you have probably already seen this but it’s too amazing not to comment on. Julie Eakes has been creating her incredible pointillism canes for quite a while, although it has been a couple of years since she created one, but her process and the finished canes never fail to fascinate.
This one, “Soul of the Rose” cane, is the most recent addition to her fabulous cane imagery portfolio. If you go to her Facebook page and go back to April 5 and scroll up to recent posts, you can see her process throughout the weeks that it took her to put this together. She mixed 77 colors for this, extruding each with a square and painstakingly put them together into 56 block canes. The complete cane before reduction was 6.5” x 8” x 2” and weighed 5 pounds. She then reduced it by sections and took a few slices off as she went so she’ll have cane images at different sizes which is what you’re seeing here.
Her cane reduction is probably not quite what you would think either. She uses a few different methods and shares her process of reduction in a video that you can find here. Don’t forget to drop by her Facebook page or Instagram account for the full story of this piece.
A Few Touches
May 28, 2018
Inspirational Art
Have you seen what crazy, amazing illustrative cane work people have been doing lately? This work has been absolutely amazing the way the canes take on a painterly look beneath the skillful hands of these particular artists.
The Kingfisher bird in this brooch is a cane by Claire Wallis. Mind-blowing isn’t it? She applied it to a painted background but she didn’t just leave it as a cane blended into a background layer. She was very thoughtful about how it would appear and applied a thin layer of translucent clay to give the edges a soft focus.
She also scratched in a pale border along the edges of the beak and some of the feathers to further blend the cane’s edge. This has the added effect of making the bird image sit on a more definite foreground plane as well as separating the abundance of cool colors in the background and bird feathers which would otherwise visually meld, making the edge of the bird’s head a bit nebulous. These little touches have really made the difference between it just being an amazing cane and creating an overall amazing image and brooch.
Claire’s cane work keeps getting better and better, even when you don’t think it could. You can check out her polymer journey on her Facebook page and Flickr site, and see her finished items in her Etsy shop.
Big Paper
May 25, 2018
Inspirational Art
I can’t tell you how thrilled I was that Meredith Dittmar agreed to do an interview for the artist profile in this issue. Her work is like nothing else that we see in polymer. It’s very illustrative and conceptual. Some of it is cute but a lot of it is otherworldly, seemingly pulled directly from dreams and not always the nice ones. The sometimes uncomfortable juxtaposition of forms and imagery makes you stop and think about what she’s trying to say. That’s after you stop gaping at how well-formed and smooth her polymer shapes are. She has developed a few tricks that she reveals in this interview, to create these well-finished compositions. You also get to see how large they are and how she cures them. It’s fascinating.
Although this was mentioned, we were not able to really delve into her compositions with paper. This is something she has been working on in recent years. The compositions are very much like her polymer work but the paper has some less cumbersome technical considerations to work with. This piece is mostly paper; however, it does have some polymer pieces in it. The paper gives the work a lighter and more fragile feel, although the imagery is still strong and poignant.
Take a look at the article and then take a look at this and her other paper compositions to see how the change in the material changes the feel of the work. You can compare pieces online by taking a look at her website, Facebook, or Instagram pages.
