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:
Outside Inspiration: Organic Disks in Glass
August 7, 2015
Inspirational Art
Keeping with the disk theme this week, I went out in search of organic versions that weren’t polymer, and as soon as I saw these, I knew I just had to share.
The luminosity of glass touched with even just a little bit of metallic feels so rich and ‘special occasion’ that even in organic forms and colors, it still looks like you need to pull out that fancy evening dress or be in the mood to garner a lot of attention in order to wear it. These gorgeous organic beads by Debbie Sanders would be head-turners no matter what they are worn with. These are a set of beads rather than a finished necklace, but other than some spacers, I’d say this grouping is good to go as a necklace.
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of polymer disks with the side accents and various textures and treatments, but I don’t know that I’ve seen them treated this way in translucents. Just imagine how the light would play through a translucent polymer disk done in this style with a bit of metal leaf or gilder’s paste, colored with a dash of ink and finished with a glossy sealant or buffed to a brilliant shine? It would compete for attention with the likes of these beads I’d think. Or better yet … combine them with these beads! Wouldn’t that be something? Oh, the ideas these outside inspirations bring us!
Debbie has a ton of these beautiful beads to be ogled over on both her website and in her Etsy shop where, by the way, you can also buy a set to play with! Just saying.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
Bright Organic
August 5, 2015
Inspirational Art, The Polymer Arts magazine news
Thank you to everyone who took part in the Reader’s Wish List Survey. We had 389 people respond, so it’s been taking me some time to get through all your ideas and questions and then compile them, but we’re working on it! I will directly answer some questions and note some of the comments in our next newsletter, so if you don’t get it already, hop on over to the website and fill in the two line form to get that email of news, cool polymer tips and community information sent to you twice a month. www.thepolymerarts.com.
The winners were chosen by a random number generator (your number coming from where you landed on the spreadsheet that your survey responses go to.) The lucky ducks who will be receiving Goodie Boxes this time around are Lorna Slack and Beth Schwartz! Congratulations!
In the meantime, we have fielded so many complements on the Fall cover. Ronna’s necklace is stunning, and that whole organic disks and seed pod theme seems to always turn heads. I thought I’d look for more pieces like that, but something a bit different. I think I found it!
The organic forms are so often created in nature’s muted or darker tones, but I have to say, this shot in the arm of brilliant color works wonderfully with them too. The saturated color and stylized shapes create a fun and joyful version of this kind of necklace. Jenna Wright uses tools she bought from Celie Fago to carve the marks into cured clay. She calls this “Inked Necklace ii” from her Electric series. I am trying to figure out the inked thing—dyeing the carved out spots perhaps? Regardless, it’s a beautiful piece of warm brights and brilliant white that brings organic up to a very cheery level.
If you want more brilliant color and fun ways with organic shapes, jump on over to Jenna’s Flickr page, Boxes of Groxes (what a fun name!) for a bright and cheery break in your day.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
The ‘Elements’ in store for Fall 2015
August 3, 2015
Inspirational Art, The Polymer Arts magazine news
As promised … here is the new cover for the Fall 2015 issue due out later this month. Our cover is graced by the soulful work of Ronna Sarvas Weltman who wrote a beautifully honest and heartfelt piece on the whys and hows of teaching art that you won’t want to miss. Among other things!
The Elements theme is all about bringing together the many parts that go into creating in order to make amazing finished pieces of art! Here are some of the inspirational and skill-building articles you can look forward to if you subscribe or pre-order:
- Embellish! The Art of the Accent with Christi Friesen
- Elements of Inspiration: Where Ideas Come From
- It’s a Small World: Micro Mosaics with Karen Mitchell
- Transfer Anything! Easy & Artful Image Transfers
- The Joyous Classroom with Ronna Sarvas Weltman
- Creating Atmosphere: The Elements of Mood
- Strange Beauty: The Art of Celine Charuau
- Alternate Avenues of Artistic Income
- Properly Equipped: Indispensable & Inexpensive Photo Accessories
- The Right Adhesive for the Job
- Fun with Pebeo Paints
- Creative Ear Wires
- … and much more
If you have not pre-ordered your copy or updated your subscription, you will want to do that now to get it hot off the presses! Head over to our website here!
And a HUGE thank you to everyone who took part in the survey. This really helps us to gear our offerings towards what YOU want to read, and this makes ALL of us very happy. Tomorrow, I will pull names for the giveaway and let the lucky ducks know by email, so I can get those physical mailing addresses from you. I’ll also announce it on Wednesday, so you’ll know if you’ve won even if the email gremlins run off with my congratulatory emails as they sometimes like to do.
So, forgive me for all the TPA news, but I need to run off and craft more good stuff for you. We will resume digging up and talking about more admirable polymer pretties on Wednesday!
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
A Stroppel Ocean
July 31, 2015
Uncategorized
I was going to share the new Fall Cover here but have a couple of bits of information we would like to confirm before we do. Creating a magazine is all details, details, details and they are never-ending! We’ll have it on here by Monday but if you’re just too curious, we’ll send it out in our newsletter tomorrow morning. (Don’t get our newsletter yet? Sign up here–it’s the box on the left of the page–for twice monthly news, tips, eye candy and other fun chatter.)
In the meantime, who would have thought that a Stroppel cane, often used in very graphical designs, would be so reminiscent of the ocean? This beautiful collar by Mara Devescovi, which is all Stroppel cane, certainly looks like the undulating water of a crystal clean ocean as you might see it on some tropical beach. Who would have thought that random cane morphing would emulate in the way the movement of the water distorts the world beneath it. It really gets one thinking about a summer escape, I must say!
Mara goes by Dev’Art60 on Flickr where her progress in polymer art over the last decade can be followed and lots of great ideas can be found along the way.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
A Memory of Tidepools
July 29, 2015
Inspirational Art
My absolute favorite part of the west coast of the United States is the tide pools. They are an amazing microcosm of marine life; not to mention the texture of the rocks and lava flows you find them in is uncommonly beautiful. Although this necklace is not the re-creation of a tide pool –the artist Aleksanta mentions still lake water among trees in her description– but for me this is so very reminiscent of the tide pools I’ve visited on the coast of California with their many tiny basins crowded up on one another that have been created by water wearing away the stone in rippling rings that are revealed at low tide as shallow reflective pools.
Don’t you love that about visual art? You can bring whatever you want to it–and you do it without trying to. Aleksanta created these with a lake in mind and it took me to the ocean. It also grabbed my attention because this looks like an example of Pebeo paints, which we will be reviewing with instructions on how to use them in the upcoming Fall issue. Speaking of which, be sure to check in here on Friday as we’ll finally be ready to show off the next cover and let you in on all the exciting stuff we have in store for you next month.
To see what else Aleksanta has done with these paints and her other beautiful explorations, take a look at her LiveMaster store.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
A Sense of Ocean
July 27, 2015
Inspirational Art
This past weekend I had to take a train trip to San Diego. The skies were clear and the beautiful landscape was filled with brilliant teals and page greens. As I struggled to get some work done rather than stare out the window the whole time, I asked my traveling companions what I should write about on my blogs this week. As they contentedly stared out the windows, they said in unison “Oceans”. So, I feel obliged this week to search out pieces that bring the feel and colors of the ocean inland to us in polymer land.
Although motifs like shells and waves would make for an obvious ocean theme, I prefer the pieces that are not so obviously defined. Subtle moods derived from patterns and soft-edged colors can give one the sense of a bright day by the ocean just like you are certain to see in this pendant by Susy Paredes. A handful of organic forms to accent the watery edges doesn’t hurt either. This unassuming piece may have been inspired by a stream or a lake, really, but we all bring our own experience to a piece, and today, I bring the ocean.
Susy’s work is largely simple and quiet without a lot of detail, certainly nothing extraneous. I do enjoy her pieces with the little organic accents the most. You’ll find quite a few on the second page of her Flickr photostream, as well as on her Etsy site.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
Goodies, Giveaways and Friesen on the Brain
July 24, 2015
Inspirational Art, Polymer issues, The Polymer Arts magazine news
We sort of kinda interrupt this art blog to tip you off about a chance to grab a bundle of goodies, get some special discounts and have your opinions and wishes heard! Then we’ll talk art.
Reader’s Wish List Survey
Take a little survey and let us know what you want to see on the blog, as well as in the magazine and in our upcoming projects as we plan for the rest of 2015 into 2016. As a thank you for your time, you’ll find these discounts and a Goodie Giveaway at the end of the survey:
—The Polymer Arts 10% off code for subscriptions and back issues on our website.*
–ILove2Craft.com 10% off code for your entire purchase at ILove2Craft.com (featuring Lisa Pavelka and Christi Friesen products.)*
–A chance to win one of two Goodie Boxes that will include a variety of tools and supplies from Polyform, Staedtler, Jacquard, CF Originals, and more (each valued at $40+).* **
The Fine Print: *Discounts and entering for the Goodie Box giveaways end at midnight PDT on August 2nd, 2015. Your promo codes will pop up on a Thank You page after you submit the survey. **Due to the unpredictability of out of country shipping times and circumstances, we will substitute clays and other sensitive materials with durable items for winners living outside the US.
Okay … now for some art to end our week. Summer colors and summer fun had been the theme, but I have Christi Friesen on the brain so we’re going to try to combine this all with some “Mechanical Botanicals” by CF herself.
Why so much Friesen distraction? For one, both the discount and the goodie box you can get by taking the survey can help you stock up on CF Originals goods (Have you seen the new little Swellegant Sampler kit! So cool … you can try it all! It’s not in the Goody Box, but you can grab it at ILove@Craft.com with that discount code mentioned!)
Also, I spent part of the day working on the latest article she’s whipped up for us at The Polymer Arts magazine … “Embellishments”! Boy, she can pack a lot of tips and tricks into a handful of pages! And the pictures! She is a generous contributor, I tell you. (I know … I need to get the line-up for the Fall issue out to you all, but it’s been an interesting wrangling of content this quarter. Next week, I promise!)
The other reason everything seems to be coming up Christi is that, well Christi came up to see me on her way out of town Wednesday. We stayed up way too late and came up with way too many amazing ideas and even more questions. One of them was about how to categorize work. And even whether we should.
Take a look at these oil cans. They’re decorative. And they’re sculptural. There is polymer, but it’s at least half other materials. So is it polymer art? Mixed-media? Multi-media? For shows, books and even on blogs and in articles, we find ourselves looking for categories and labels and ways to put things into a particular box. But do we need to?
Don’t worry. We didn’t come up with the answer to the universe and everything or the definitive answers to these questions either the other night. We did decide that maybe backing off the labels and categories so we stop mentally boxing things in so often could be a good thing though. So, let’s not say that this is polymer art or mixed media or sculpture or decor. Let’s just say it’s bits of the artist that is here for all of us to enjoy. And most of the time, that should be enough.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
Where Spring and Summer Collide
July 22, 2015
Inspirational Art
One of the striking things about summer is that point where some of the vegetation on the hills are still green and putting forth great effort to uphold their place in the sun while swathes of other plants have given up and turned brown. Even though I don’t like to see the hills turn brown, that time where the last vestiges of spring and the heat of summer collide is so beautiful in its contrast.
These earrings by Sylvie Peraud is just one such example. Greens turn to yellow as the plant’s energies are sapped, but when seen on a hill with the morning sun hitting it, it’s just radiant. I don’t know if Sylvie was thinking this when creating these, but it reminds me of the places I was running just a couple of weeks ago out here in Southern California.
Writing about these lead me to Sylvie’s blog where she has some really stunning new work you just have to see as well. Jump on over to her blog and check out her wide range of work on her Flickr pages when you take a creative recharge break today or this week. It will be a good mid-year and mid-week place for new inspiration.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine, as well as by supporting our advertising partners.
The Ups and Downs of Summer
July 20, 2015
Inspirational Art
In the northern hemisphere we are in the midst of summer, but Mother Nature is showing her many sides from hot and still to muggy and stormy, from tornadoes to floods to hurricanes. Down in the southern hemisphere, summer days are a distant memory, but nonetheless, summery colors are making a surge on the pages I’ve been visiting.
Lillian de Vries created this pendant with its interesting visual and tactile texture as inspiration for a summer challenge on Craftliners.com, a blog for the European wholesale company Craftlines, for which Lillian is a designer. The colors are mostly warm but delicate with a scattering of dark speckles falling out of a cooling ceiling of blue. It strikes me as a visual interpretation of a summer memory with its up and down days scattered through the memories of hot afternoons and those thankfully cool mornings.
Lillian plays with all kinds of texture, both visual and tactile, as well as stopping to create miniature and faux foods here and there. If you’re have a gratefully cool morning hiding from the heat, or are down under dreaming of warmer days, make a temperature appropriate beverage and escape into the creative wanderings on her blog and Craftliner’s pages.
Hail Sale and Impressive Dots
July 18, 2015
Inspirational Art
Did you miss us yesterday? Sorry for the absence, but all kinds of wonderful things have been going on; they have just been keeping me buried until I couldn’t remember what day it was. For some reason I thought the last three days were all Thursday. Can you say sleep deprived?Why is this? Well, for one, I was acting as my own administrative assistant, but only because our wonderful admin, Kat, has been off this week introducing her new baby girl to the world. Send lots of love and may the powers-that-be grant them both lots of rest!
The other thing that was overwhelming was the sale of dinged up back issues we started Thursday that was far more popular than we anticipated. I wanted to share it with you, my dear blog readers, and give you a chance to grab some yourself, but we nearly sold out in the first few hours. I had to wait until today to go through our unopened stock and find those inevitably imperfect copies so I had something to offer you. So here it is …
The Print Issue Hail Sale: Okay, hail didn’t damage these copies, mostly shipping, storing and traveling did the damage, but that’s a long name for a sale. These are ones with markings on the cover, rubbed off ink, creased corners and small tears that we won’t sell as new, but I do sell for a discount when out and about. However, they have been piling up, so we decided to make them available to you online at half price! So, these are just $5 (plus shipping). Quantities are very limited, so jump on over to my Etsy page where we’ve listed them. That way, sold out issues will drop off instead of sitting there teasing you when there aren’t any more left.
In my shop we are also selling all regular ‘perfect’ back issues for $8 plus shipping. If you are buying just one, it ends up being the same as buying from our website, but if you buy multiples, you will save by getting reduced shipping. So if you have been wanting to stock up on back issues in print and you don’t mind a few marks on the cover or a creased corner, this would be the time to do that!
And now some weekend art. Because we need pretties to cheer up our weekend. We’ve done all these dot pieces, but not outside polymer, so here are a few pieces by ceramicist Lisa Stevens. Wednesday’s post was also super popular, so I’m thinking a few of you who tried (or plan to try) that dotted tutorial, and these pieces made me think of a short cut way to do similar work–by just impressing with hand tools. You can use acrylic, mica powders or alcohol inks to color the holes or back fill with clay. Or brush on ink tinted liquid polymer to get a similar glazed ceramic look.
Lisa does a lot of these impression type treatments. If you want more pretty and inspiring impressed dot ideas, jump over to her Flickr pages.
