Stocking up on Texture

There’s nothing quite so energizing in the studio as new materials or tools. But after the holidays, sometimes the budget is a little slim. Don’t let that stop you, though.

You can always make a new set of texture stamps or plates from scrap clay. Simple, easy to do, and inexpensive, you can pull texture from anything around you or ‘doodle’ on a sheet of clay. Here is a sheet by Cynthia Gordillo that employs the doodling approach with wonderful results. This kind of design might take a little time, but what wonderful texture sheets you’d end up with.

Cynthia documented her texture sheet creation on her blog here so you can see the tools she used to make these marks. But you needn’t stop there. You can do a couple other things with these sheets besides creating the initial texture.

You can get two plates for your efforts by making a negative of it–prep your new baked texture sheet with your favorite release (I am big on ArmorAll for this kind of thing) and press a thick sheet of clay carefully and thoroughly onto it. Pull it off and bake and you have sheet #2. You can also take that same negative sheet of clay and cut circles, squares, or odd shapes to include the most intriguing parts of the design so you have smaller stamps to work with. To eliminate some of the roundedness of the texture’s raised surface, you can sand the positive or negative  sheet on a full piece of sandpaper laid flat on a table. If you sand with coarse sandpaper you’ll have a contrasting matte or slightly textured surface.