Combining Filigree, Embroidery and Applique
June 19, 2015
Inspirational Art
Take a close look at this jewelry set. How many variations of impressing, winding, twisting, layering and embedding little bits of clay do you see here? I’ve gotten a different count each time; I’m giving up on trying to give it a number and have spent my time admiring and determining the variation. And the patience. The lining up of these little bits to create lines or to create dense areas of texture is very precise. The variety enlivens the limited palette, which would otherwise be relying primarily on the contrast of lights and darks for impact.
This particular image was found on Pinterest attached to a number of boards all leading to the same image link, which will not lead me to any websites where I can find more information about the artist. That is a little maddening because the name is listed right there. It even looks familiar, but I can’t search farther for the simple reason that I can’t type in those letters. So, I’m sitting at a dead-end without any more information for you. I’m hoping one of you wonderful readers can read the text and then can send me a link. I believe this was pulled off vk.com (for the English only folks on here … it’s like Facebook for Eastern Europe and happens to be the #1 most visited site in that part of the world, as well as falling into the top 50 most visited sites worldwide), so I’m hoping someone can find it for us. You know how I don’t like to avoid bringing you art simply because I can’t find its origin, and I do like correcting that.
And as a little reminder in that vein … always add the artist’s name or website to your pins, even if you are just pinning it for yourself. Anything that is pinned on a non-private board (the default for Pinning) can and usually is picked up by others, but when it’s picked up off a home page that changes (like blogs) or a page that is temporary or the link gets broken or removed, the artist is no longer linked. If you like it enough to pin it, do what you can to ensure people who pull your pins can find the person who kindly shared their work with us and inspired us in the first place.
*Update* Many thanks go out to our reader Janna who found our the website of our artist, Olesyah Kalenova: http://vk.com/olesyakalenovahandmade.
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.
Colour Breakthrough – Throwing Out the Wheel
June 10, 2015
Inspirational Art
One of our most unusual articles in the summer issue, the one we definitely spent the most time on getting just right for you all, is Tracy Holmes’ “Color Connections”. This is a color lesson and color mixing tutorial that throws out the color wheel and works with mixing and matching in three dimensions. The exercises are easy and fun, and you end up with a reusable and expandable color mixing cube. It will teach you the basics that will allow you to eventually move onto using Tracy’s soon-to-be-available color cards that will expand your potential palette to hundreds of easily mixed and matched colors.
The thing we didn’t have a lot of room for in the article was expanding on how to use it to choose colors, not just mix them. So here is a quick visual tutorial on how using this system works for creating color palettes.
Tracy’s partner, Dan Cormier, had made a ‘blurred lines’ blended veneer. He wanted to find an accent color, so he looked through Tracy’s cards, first to find colors that were in the blend, and then to find a complement color for one of those colors. He used the codes to find the yellow that was the exact opposite of the purple. Then he mixed clay to match that color and made a sheet to dieform through the hole in the baked blend veneer. The purple become another accent within the accent at the center of the bead.
Sounds easy, right? Well, it sounds like it could be easy if you understand the system. That’s what the article helps you understand—how colors are connected, not just by mapping them on a two-dimensional wheel, but through other colors as well, which is why understanding how color are truly related takes a three-dimensional model. Go ahead and go through the steps in the article for an easy first look at this idea, as well as getting a primer on a new way to look at color that can encompass our digital, printing and artistic color mixing worlds.
Tracy is not the only one out there promoting these new base color ideas, and you are likely to see this kind of color approach coming to you from a number of arenas. Right now Tracy’s Colour Cards are the only method I know of that will allow an artist to work with this newer approach to color mixing and matching in an easy and accessible way. To be one of the first to get the new cards when they arrive, sign up for Tracy’s newsletter, so you can get on the Kickstarter program, which will be your first and best chance to pre-order your own BreakThroughColour Colour Cards and Cubes. It’s not just exclusive to Kickstarter, but there are special ‘Project Backer’ prices for supporters.
Full details about limited edition packages and early bird deals will go out first to the new BreakThroughColour mailing list, so hop on over and take a second to sign up for the BreakThroughColour mailing list. And to get your Summer 2015 issue of The Polymer Arts, go to our website at www.thepolymerarts.com.
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.
Riveting Ideas
June 8, 2015
Inspirational Art
Now that the latest issue of The Polymer Arts is wrapped up and either in hand or on the way to our many excited readers, we get to look back at what went into this issue and show off a few more items and ideas that we couldn’t squeeze in.
For me, one of the really, really exciting sections of this issue was delving into cold connections and visiting some rather traditional jewelry techniques, but with polymer in mind. This was especially fun for me because I had the opportunity to revisit some techniques that had kind of dropped off my studio table, so to speak, the last few years. Back in art school, I was taught jewelry making and metalsmithing from a traditional perspective, so when I started exploring ways to combine metals with polymer, I found myself returning to some of those traditional techniques, primarily rivets and eyelets.
Using metal-centric techniques with polymer can be a little tricky, but new tools and smart approaches have made it really accessible to anyone with a few basic jewelry tools. In this issue we got to hit all the basics so that any of our readers could easily learn to rivet and add eyelets to polymer work. It gave me a chance to complete some tests and explorations, which forced me into the studio for several long days (I was not suffering mind you!) To my delight, with a little tweaking and careful testing, I was able to put together a series of tutorials with super-easy ways to rivet with polymer, as well as sneaking in some simple handcrafted pin heads and easy eye-pin tutorials.
The one thing we didn’t get to spend a long time on–and when I say ‘we’ I am referring to Julie Cleveland’s Polymer Jeweler’s Workbench overview article on engineering jewelry with cold connections, as well as the riveting tutorials–was some ideas for using rivets and eyelets, not just as a means of connection, but as independent design elements. One such example is this pin Libby Mills created some years back where secondary focal points are created with three rivets. These rivets certainly hold the polymer to their metal base, but they are balancing accents to the framed open space at the center. The rivets have a visually anchoring effect on what is otherwise a rather open design. Try to imagine this without the rivets. They are really essential to the composition, not just the construction of the piece.
Libby has explored polymer and rivets a number of times over the years as evident in her Flickr photostream. After taking a look at the things Libby has done with rivets you might want to visit or revisit the Riveting Polymer article and see if you don’t have a serious interest in trying your hand at making some riveting polymer work yourself.
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.
Brazenly Bold
June 5, 2015
Inspirational Art
To end a big and bold week, we just have to go visit the genius that is Ford and Forlano. Their work is not limited by convention in any fashion, and yet their work does not appear uncomfortable or ungainly. Yes, their work is often large and visually arresting, but also there is often an openness or airiness to the forms or composition.
This necklace is a great example of going big and bold, but not looking like something that would weigh the wearer down. Its boldness is defined by the space it spreads through and the textures and bright colors. The open wire work fills the space with connections between the polymer beads, so it has a very tight cohesiveness, but it is, gratefully, not dense.
Their website has an easy to search archive of their work, so you can wander through their creative journey chronologically or zip over to your favorite art jewelry form to see what they have been up to in the last decade or so. The forms, colors and textures are highly varied, but the brazenness of their compositions is always there. Enjoy a break on their website at http://fordforlano.com/
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.
Big Friendship
June 3, 2015
Inspirational Art
Now off to the world of big and bold and even a bit of wild; although, this piece is not that wild when it come to the work of polymer artist Sona Grigoryan.
Everything Sona does is big and unabashedly bold. She shares what seems to be a kind of expressive abandon with our Monday artist, Christine Damm, in regards to her approach to form, texture and a loose organic style. Just maybe, that is at the heart of the big and bold, at least with polymer. Being able to be so expressive, to not feel confined by any standards of size or shape, and although I am sure there is a lot more planning than is readily apparent, the forms feel open and free.
It was just really tough to pick just one of Sona’s many bold pieces, but I do like the complexity and arrangement of the elements in this necklace and found the overall form quite intriguing. Plus, you have to like the connection it has to others in our polymer world. This piece was a gift from Sona to Wendy Moore, so she called it an Armenian-Australian Friendship Necklace. I added an image of Wendy wearing it while standing next to Sona, so you can get a better idea of its size. It looks great on Wendy, doesn’t it? Some people can really carry the big and bold jewelry well. They just need a personality, and maybe the stature, to match.
If you like this, then be prepared to see bigger and bolder on Sona’s Flickr page and on her website where you should spend a bit of your day pouring over her unique work.
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.
Connection–Summer 2015, Now Available … and Going Bold
June 1, 2015
Inspirational Art
First of all, the latest issue of The Polymer Arts is out! Print issues made it to the post office on Friday, so those are on their way, and the digital issue was released yesterday. If you were expecting a digital issue and you don’t see it in your inbox, check those pesky spam folders to see if it got filtered there. Otherwise, my ever-efficient assistant, Kat, can check on your subscription or order when you write her at connect@thepolymerarts.com (if you get this by email, just respond to this post, and it will go straight to her as well.) Connections is the theme for Summer 2015, and this issue is quite full to the rafters of ideas, tutorials, tips and inspiration for making connections of all kinds. Check out the line-up on the list on our home page: www.thepolymerarts.com.
In the meantime, how about a bold jewelry week while I get things back in order over at TPA headquarters?
I have long been fond of the colors and textures, as well as the kind of abandon that Christine Damm creates with her work. This piece really jumped off the screen when I first saw this a year or so ago. Christine’s magic is in the consistency of her choices. Her work is rough and imperfect, organic and unafraid. These adjectives can be applied to her chosen forms, application, texture and composition. So a huge form like the piece that takes over the focus of this necklace can have an intense sense of presence because as rough and imperfect as it is, there is such obvious intention in it being this way.
Christine’s work is really very fascinating. I have no idea where her forms might come from–they are quite original–and her colors and immediacy of the look make it hard to look away. For more of Christines’ work, go to her Flickr pages and her website.
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.
Translucent Clouds
May 29, 2015
Inspirational Art
First of all, I just realized this will be the last post of May. Really? This month is over? Wow … that went quick. Due to all the bedlam here, we’ve been just barely keeping up with the 3 blogs a week, and we have at least another week or so of chaos to get through. So, between that and all the notes from people who are liking the 3 days a week (“We have so much to read every day as it is …”), for now, we are going to keep this pace. Once we have the summer issue wrapped up next week, I’ll put together a survey (and some fun stuff to give away!) and give everyone who wants to offer their opinion, a chance to weigh in on the blog schedule.
In the meantime, my search for recent translucent clay work that uses the clay’s very particular characteristics in a new or surprising way was not as fruitful as I might have hoped. Have we gotten a bit tired of it? There are plenty of people using it to produce a wide variety of faux effects and mixing it with regular clays for better color and luminosity, but purely translucent for the sake of playing with its diaphanous quality seems to be the purview of just a handful of folks. However, in my search I ran across the pieces you see here. The first example I saw was the earrings you see in the upper left. I thought they were polymer, but then I got to the artist’s page and realized it had to be acrylic.
The artist is Jahyun Rita Baek, and this work is not new either, but something created when Rita was in art school in the United Kingdom. The series is called Cloud, which I believe is referring to the concept of light in both the illuminating quality and the perceived weight that are at play here. The work is beautifully simplistic and mesmerizing. Similar approaches with translucent polymer would be just as amazing, don’t you think?
So, this is the bit of inspiration I wanted to share with you today. Simple forms in floating and swirling designs could be created so easily with polymer. About the only thing this would take is knowing how to hold back and working clean–by which I mean clean clay and clean lines. If I could even get into my studio right now, I would go play for an hour just to relieve some stress. But parts of my office are in the way! So back to that.
Jump over to Rita’s website for more of her unusual work, not just in acrylic, but all kinds of materials from plastic to precious. And enjoy a beautiful spring weekend with a bit of creativity mixed in!
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.
Looking Through to Another Dimension
May 25, 2015
Inspirational Art
We haven’t visited the wonderful world of transluscents in awhile, and I have been curious to see what people have been doing lately. Strangely, there is not a lot of recently posted work. Anyone have anything new they’d like to share? I’ll keep searching, but I’m up for some striking new work to be landing in my mailbox, too. Hint, hint.
In the meantime, here is a beautiful piece by Brazil’s Beatriz Cominatto that she created a few years back. It’s not a complex concept, this scale-like layering of cane slices, but it does show off the particular advantage of working with translucents. Instead of considering just the surface of the clay, translucents allow you to focus on the content of the depth of the clay. The layering offers another dimension to the design when translucents are in play, which allows for such criss-cross patterning and other ways to create lines that work in multiple ways.
Beatrice created this in 2012, if the Flickr date is correct. She did a lot of exploring in many different techniques then, so although there is not a lot of translucent, she did some great sushi canes with the translucent clay along with other polymer work. You can explore more of Beatrice’s work on her Flickr page and her website.
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 View of Charm and Color
May 20, 2015
Inspirational Art
I jumped on Pinterest to see what interesting work might have arisen while I was deep in proofing mode for the next issue, and one of the first things that popped up was this bracelet by Doreen Kassel. It delighted me so much, in part due to the section in an upcoming article in this Summer issue where she explains her inspiration for her cute and quirky pieces.
It’s probably best that I save those tidbits for you to read in the context of the article. However, in the process of looking up the image and her website, I also found these odd fruit that I had seen before and just thought they were fantastically colorful and formed. There is a ton of texture to examine as well and not a little bit of hand tooling and form building to divine and try.
If you’re enjoying the fun and colors as much as I am, pop over to her website to see her posted collection of new pods, plants and other colorful pieces. For those of us who have been dealing with rain and gray skies for days now, this color is a welcome sight!
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.
Would you call yourself a selfish person? I doubt very many of us would think that way about ourselves. Yet, as artists, we often find ourselves “stealing” time away from others or other things to do what we love, reveling in it when we have it. Is that selfish? I mean, it is more about us than anyone else, isn’t it?
Yes, it is about us, and that is as it should be. In the requested comments for last week’s giveaway (scroll down to see the winner and this week’s giveaway), participants mentioned some version of the “me time” aspect of getting to sit down and create more than anything else. I mean, I know we create because it is something we enjoy, regardless of what anyone else thinks, but I just love that so many people acknowledged and celebrated it. We should!
I strongly believe that everyone should have something of their own, something they can turn to in order to express themselves or at least put something out into the world that would not have existed without their desire to create it. The art we create gives us purpose, exercises a uniquely human part of our brains, and helps us to love ourselves. Not to mention that we deserve the joy we get from it!
But, by definition, that is selfish—doing something because it’s what we want. I wish our society would get over the idea that doing something for ourselves is bad. I think not doing things for yourself is self-negligence. Why is that not a commonly understood thing?
This also highlights the bigger, contradictory world that we inhabit. We live in such strange societies where selflessness and humility are expected or requested, and yet we are also pushed to strive for excellence in what we do. How do we reach excellence without focusing on ourselves? And then there is this silliness where we are not supposed to acknowledge when the work we do is good or that we’re proud of it. If we do, others may think we’re being arrogant or grandiose.
So, do we strive to be great and then pretend that we’re mediocre? We talk about contrast being good in art, but this is so not the right kind of contrast!
I’ve long found the dichotomy of these contradictory but societally prescribed behaviors beyond aggravating as well as having the potential to be debilitating. I think that is why it made me so happy to see so many people acknowledging their creative hours as me-time, self-care, and a time of wonderfully selfish joy. Keep it up, I say!
Now, let’s talk about the good kind of contrast in art.
Design Refresh
Let’s look at the beautiful brooch by Lyne Tilt that opened this post. What do you notice first about this? There’s a lot going on in this little space, isn’t there? What are the three things that jump out at you as far as design elements?
I’m going to say color, shape, and texture. Did you come up with the same three? There is also a lot going on with marks and size. So, any combination of those would be spot on.
How about design principles? What do you think is the number one principal used in this design? Sure, we could refer to scale and proportion considering all the different sizes of the layers, or we could talk about focal point or even just key in on the centered composition. But the one thing this has in spades is contrast.
Obviously, there is color contrast in all the major color characteristics—she has a vibrant trio of warm colors contrasting the cool of the blue and cyan; color values range from the dark blue and deep red to the moderate orange to the light yellow and pale polished silver; and, if you check your CMY color wheels, you’ll see that the color of the bottom layer is a blue-cyan whose complementary AND split complementaries are the yellow, orange, and red that you see in the upper layers.
But doesn’t a color palette have to have at least one common characteristic between all the colors? Well, ideally, yes, and this does. Here it’s saturation. These are not muted colors. The orange may be slightly tinted (has some white in it) but not enough to feel it’s gone off base from the saturated characteristic that ties them all together.
Now, look at the contrast in the textures. The top and bottom layers might have the same texture, but the rest are vastly different. There are even different materials—metal and clay. But they work together pretty well, don’t they? Why?
The textures work together in part because they are all drastically different—the wide variety is part of the charm of this piece. But, like color, they need something to tie them together.
Did you notice that the textures are applied to the entire layer from one edge to another? Thier differences are connected because the application on each layer is the same. That does seem to be enough to allow them to exist in the same piece and not have it feel completely chaotic.
The shapes, on the other hand, are not completely different but they are not the same either, right? They are all some version of a hand cut circle, but some of them are definitely more oval. I think pulling back on the amount of contrast between the shapes also helps to rein in the potential chaos all this dramatic contrast and color and texture could fall into. The centered composition also adds a bit of calm to the piece.
Let’s take this week to consider the design principle of contrast. Would your pieces benefit from more contrast, or do you need to rein some of that in? Remember, it all depends on your intention. There are no wrong levels of contrast, at least not in art.
Last Week’s Giveaway
Drum roll please…
This last week’s randomly chosen winner is Eloise B! I’ve spoken to her and her clay is already on the way. Congrats Eloise!
This Week’s Giveaway
Thank you to everyone who participated in last week’s giveaway through comments on the post. As mentioned above, it really made me happy to see all the fantastic, positive and self-caring observations. I also hope it gave you a moment to focus on and appreciate what you love so much about creating.
So, let’s do this again.
The Goodies:
- This week I have a selection of Sculpey clays in 2 new Soufflé colors, 3 new Premo colors, and 2 big 8 oz. blocks of clay stash basics—Sculpey III in Pearl and Silver. That’s 26 ounces of fresh clay along with a three-piece set of Sculpey silkscreens.
- Or if outside the US, I have a $25 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 type of contrast you enjoy creating most in your own work, or the type of contrast you wish you used more of. And, yes, if you want to share pictures, you can do so by including a link. Just don’t put more than one link in or it may spam filter the comment.
- Note: It can take some time for the comment to appear if you’ve not commented before since, due to annoying spamming, I have to approve it .
- Giveaway winners will be chosen by random—it will NOT be based on your answers. I do hope you’ll give it some thought anyway. The answers could be helpful to you as well as interesting for the rest of us.
- 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 17th 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…
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We are going to be dropping in on some big names this week and next to see what they are up to and what they have to inspire us with.
First up: Bonnie Bishoff. Her focus on jewelry these last couple years has been a journey through a variety of styles as she moves from working primarily in veneers on furniture with her partner J.M. Syron to smaller and more intimate work. But regardless of the style, her quietly strong and confident sense of color and pattern mark each piece like a signature. These lovely earrings are paired almost solely by color scheme although they do work within a limited set of variations in composition, visual texture and shapes. Each variation relays a slightly different mood, adjusted through the level of contrast in value and hue. The subtlety of this communication is what really brings home how masterful her color work is.
You can see what I mean by looking at the body of her work. You can do so by jumping onto her Instagram page and the website she shares with J.M. Syron.
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Happy Monday, fellow polymer enthusiasts. I’m not sure how this week is going to turn out as I have not had time to put together a full-fledged theme so we’re gonna go with “things that caught my eye” for now.
I’m sure you can understand why this piece by Marion Le Coq aka Fancy Puppet, might have caught my eye. They are fun and refreshing pieces, wonderfully finished and composed. She connects all her elements with repetition of motifs, colors, or other things. For example, the leaf off the apple is reflected in the leaf addition on the back and hanging leaves. The carrot’s colors are reflected in its layered pieces behind it, and its crisscross of lines reflect the crisscross of the plaid.
I’m guessing the plaids and dots are silkscreen but the secret is probably available on her YouTube page where she has dozens of tutorials and review items. She’s also quite busy elsewhere online. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, Canal blog, and Etsy.
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I recently realized that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the lowly squiggle. But who doesn’t like a well-done squiggle? I guess it’s hard to take it seriously with such a silly-sounding name but the sound of the word itself describes it so well.
I myself am very fond of squiggles and apply them throughout my work, primarily as accents, but some people take the squiggle to wonderfully elevated levels as the central theme of their piece.
This pin by Petra Nemravová is an excellent example of the squiggle stealing the show. The organization of these wonderfully unruly squiggles brings a regular rhythm to their organic movement. It reins in the rambling energy that this kind of squiggle contains. The bright array of colors, which could also get out of hand, is held in check by a regular graduation from one color to the next, helping to create an energetic but contained feeling.
Petra is such an advocate of bright colors and cheerful compositions. Enjoy a stroll through her colorful world on her Flickr photostream. She is also the genius mind behind the wonderful selections found in the online polymer shop Nemravka, serving the European polymer and craft communities and beyond.
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I decided this week I would like to talk about work that speaks to me. Well, I don’t mean that I want to talk about me so much as use pieces that do speak to me as examples of what it means when a piece of artwork elicits a response from the viewer.
For various reasons, I ended up thinking and talking a lot about how we define art this past week. I have long felt that art should be defined as work that is made with expression and intention, with a goal of eliciting an intellectual or emotional response. Yes, I know a lot of people will say that it is the individual who should determine what art is to them but I would like to suggest that such a statement is not quite the right phrase. Each of us can determine what is good art or what is bad art—to that I absolutely agree. But shouldn’t a label such as “art” have a more specific definition than just whatever someone thinks is art, or just something that is made by hand, as the definition would seem to be nowadays?
I am guilty of this broad use as well so I’m not pointing fingers, I’m just a big proponent of using language to effectively communicate and I think it would be great if the English language had a well-defined use of the word “art” that allowed us to talk about work born of self-expression versus craftwork or artisan work created from skilled hands.
My definition also brings up the question of what does it mean to elicit a response? It is not as confined a concept as it might sound like so I thought I’d try to define that a little this week.
For a piece of work to elicit a response all it has to do is make the viewer stop and feel something, or stop and think. It could be something as simple as making them smile or as complex as questioning societal norms. It can be positive such as emitting a sense of peacefulness or negative such as work with a high shock value geared to make you appalled or angry. If the piece is made with intention, part of that intention will, consciously or unconsciously, be to communicate with the viewer, and if the artist is communicating then they are attempting to elicit a response. Good art accomplishes this. Bad art is too distracting in its failings to communicate or illicit anything of value.
This piece here feels like a very personal piece for Shannon Tabor who commented on her Instagram post of this that “I’m back to my roots in design with ‘Compass’. My Back To Basics study is over and I’m anxious to get all these design ideas out of my head and onto my clay!”
I can feel her excitement for this new work in the composition and surface treatment of this necklace. There is a buzzing kind of energy from the scratches and the asymmetrical placement of elements but there’s also a reservedness in the basic geometric shapes and the subdued and shaded palette. I found that I was drawn to the contrast between that reserved feeling and that feeling of excitement. It reminds me of that point in time right before things really take off in some exciting new venture, which I love, and so that must be what made me stop and spend time with this piece.
So, you see, Shannon may have been working on something specific to what she wanted to explore but the intention in her skilled design choices allowed me to connect with her emotion, or at least my sense of what her emotion must’ve been. That’s eliciting a response. And to me, that’s what makes it art.
See what else Shannon is up to by following her on Instagram or hopping over to her website.
Read MoreHappy Monday to you all. Business first… preorders for the fall issue of The Polymer Arts is available online now. We don’t have a precise publication date but looks like mid-September. I’ll let you know here on the blog, in our newsletter, and on the website when we know. Again, thank you for your patience with me while I work on healing my overworked joints.
Okay, one more piece of wall art, this time by the inventive Angela Barenholtz. I know it seems like we’ve been talking about wall art for a couple weeks but this will probably be the last for a bit. I picked this one for a couple reasons having little to do with wall art.
For one, it’s a really fun piece with its variety in color, visual texture, and even the long shapes that make up this “polymer quilt.” Creating with a large variety of primary elements makes for energy-infused and eye-catching work. But, the trick is that everything still needs to work together and have some kind of relationship. In this case, the relationship is in the consistency of the type of pieces inserted into this quilt—long and evenly cut strips of visual texture arranged in a square composition. With this much consistency, you can go nuts with the variety of color, texture, and pattern.
Each one of these could actually sit on its own—like it could be a pendant or brooch if small enough, or even a pair of earrings. Giving yourself a canvas of a certain size and shape releases you from having to be overly concerned about the bounds of individual elements and construction of the work, particularly if you’re creating jewelry, and you get to play with what you place on that canvas. I imagine a lot of you might find that attractive, being we are so in love with our surface treatments, canes, and textures. How many times have you fallen in love with just the sheet of clay you were working on before it became anything? Creating a simple surface to work with can allow you to present those fantastic results in a fun and easy manner.
Angela is all about surface design and variety. You can see that by looking at her Flickr photostream. She also generously shares her techniques in her published tutorials which you can find on Etsy.
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Guest Blog Post by Teresa Pandora Salgado
Van Gogh admitted to the world, “I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.” Me too, Vincent.
One of the most infuriatingly fabulous things I cannot do is make cane like Jon Stuart Anderson. Jon creates canes in a cunning palette that leans in close and whispers, “Go ahead…take your time…look at me.” And I surely do. And the world does too.
I love the way Jon cruises nimbly past the pedestrian cane crossing. He jaywalks that trodden path without ever touching the ground. Obvious contrast? He doesn’t need it, no matter how much the cane is reduced. Nor does he require new colors. Jon keeps it fresh with precision, composition, and balance. Neat trick.
Jon Anderson is known for his millefiori animals: elephants, turtles, bulls, and birds. You’ll notice the creatures have a flesh and blood sense about them, a beating heart beneath their rich robes. So you look and you look and then, just when you think you know him, Jon takes you to another fork in the road. To the left, skulls, vessels, lights. And to the right, guitars. Ohhh, the guitars.
So, go ahead. Look. Be inspired. Aspire.
See Jon’s work at his website here.
Teresa Pandora Salgado is a polymer clay artist, designer & instructor from Los Angeles, California. She has made 87 YouTube tutorials which have garnered over 2 million hits from viewers in 151 countries. In addition to teaching live workshops on millefiori complex caning across the U.S., Teresa helms the online store, Tiny Pandora Crafting Boutique, which featuresMilll her specialized tools and kits.
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In perusing #the100dayproject on Instagram these past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that veneers are quite the thing to be experimenting with right now. Whether you call polymer sheets you work with surface design, surface treatments, or polymer veneers, it does feel like the clay surface is having a renaissance of exploration.
One of the first of these explorations that I’ve noticed in recent weeks was this piece by Lindly Haunani, which she posted on Facebook. Of course, the queen of color is going to have a showstopper based on her color choices alone, but the subtle texture and the composition of the layout of the veneers, for all the energy of the color and lines, has such a satisfying sense of calm and rightness. There is that obvious sense of intention and deftness of skill that brings refinement to such unquestionably masterful work, even in a piece the artist claims is exploration.
Explore more of Lindly’s work on her website and Facebook page.
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Another great contribution to the Spring issue was in our artists’ gallery. All of our artists are unique in their approach but it is Isabelle, known online as Bellou, whose designs are really standing out.
Isabelle creates bold, contemporary adornments that are polished to a glass-like shine. Her work often has a centered focal point but the balance of the components are set in asymmetric arrangements or are all shaped differently with different treatments. However, in all the disparity there is a common element that brings it together.
This is one of the pieces she sent us that we couldn’t work into the gallery pages. On the one side, there are wide, solid pieces, dense with texture, but on the other side, the space is opened with a series of cut-out shapes that have the same mica shift texture as the other side. The rest of the center piece brings in a grounding energy to the movement of lines and shapes that play across the necklace.
To see more of Bellou’s work, take a look at her shop pages here.
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