The Allure of The Landscape
November 11, 2013
Inspirational Art
This week I wanted to talk about landscapes. Not so much the category of visual art that denotes representation of broad outdoor scenes, but more the use of the landscape orientation–designs that run along the horizontal with individual or separate components that are visually a single, continuous image.
To start the week off (and because I have a very long and hectic day ahead getting the files done for the next issue), I have here an older piece of mine that’s still one of my favorites, using kind of a tile choker design. The wing spread of the dragon-like image and the suggested distant scenery goes all the way around the necklace. I made this back in my more purist polymer days, so everything except the small glass beads is polymer, including the wire-like lines around the faux enamel and a piece of my elabradorite in the center.
Chokers with tile beads make creating a continuous scene fairly easy, since there isn’t too much in the way of complicated planning to get the pieces to sit properly. I’ve made a lot of these types of necklaces, changing up the size and shapes of the tiles as well as making long enough for a necklace instead of a choker, but I think keeping the basic design simple as I did here made this one of the more successful ones when it comes to the visual “landscape” created.
Alright, back to getting the Winter 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts whipped into printable shape. Enjoy your Monday. And for our USA readers, if you have the chance on this Veteran’s Day, consider giving one or a handful of our service men and women, past and present, a warm hug and thank you for doing what they’ve done for us all. And since I’m not likely to get out of the house with all this work … a warm thank you and e-hug from me to all the service people reading. You are very much appreciated.
Faux Organic Surprises
August 13, 2013
Inspirational Art, The Polymer Arts magazine news
First thing I had to do today was check and see if art work by this particular artist by the name of Sage Bray was ever featured on this blog. My goodness … no, she hasn’t been. How could she have been overlooked for so long?
Answer: Easily! And on purpose.
Not that I don’t like affirmation that there are some people out there that enjoy my art work but I’ve never been a limelight kinda girl and, besides, I’m overly critical of my own work, always feeling it could have been done better which makes it hard to share sometimes. Still, every once in a blue moon, even the most self-critical artist can be excited about something they’ve done. In this next issue (that starts mailing out next week, the mailing list for the first batch of print issues is going to the shipper’s Thursday morning so get your order in!) I have on article on a series of techniques I only recently developed and am having so much fun with them!
I’d been playing with techniques to emulate weathered and worn textures on and off this year and recently had some surprising results that have opened the door to even more great textures. I have to say I was pretty amazed by the effects. This stuff look very realistic! How cool. Here is article’s header image with a little piece of wall art I created with the techniques. What do you think?
This article is ridiculously packed with 6 basic techniques/skills that can be used to show wear and weathering and 3 faux applications that combine these (rusted metal, charred wood and weathered wood–all in the piece you see here). And the thing is, what this article shows is just the tip of the iceberg for any adventurous artist who wants to push these techniques (I know I will be in the coming months!)
I’ll see about updating you on my faux organic weathered texture experiments later in the year. In the meantime, be sure to get your Fall issue so you can go play with these too. And then please share them with me if you do! You can post work on our Facebook page or write me at sbray(a)thepolymerarts.com with your artwork, thoughts, comments, criticisms or whatever you feel you need to share … I always love to hear from our readers!
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Fanni Sandor creates exquisitely small and biologically accurate creatures in polymer clay and mixed mediums. Her choice to go small is born of a fascination with minature art and we, likewise, are fascinated by the tiny masterpieces. See more on her Instagram page.
What size art do you work in? Have you even ever thought about that? Do you work small, big, or a nice moderate middle size?
I think many of us have a limited size range that we feel comfortable working in and rarely, if ever, venture outside that range. There’s nothing wrong with that but it does beg the question, do you think about what the appropriate size is when you create something?
As you might be guessing, if you’ve been reading my blog or design articles for any length of time, I’m about to point out that making the decision about the size of your work can help to fulfill your intention.
(Do you ever think, “If she says something about intention one more time…!” Well, I do hope it’s not annoying. It’s just that important!)
Size in art simply refers to how big or small something is. It is used in a variety of ways to emphasize, organize, assist in functionality, and symbolize the intention of the artist. A lot of the size choices made have to do with relativity – something can only be called small if something else is big and vice versa.
In design, this is actually a principal known as proportion and scale. Proportion is about the relative size between two or more objects or elements when they are grouped together or juxtaposed. Scale refers to how big or small something is compared to the general understanding of how a thing usually is or should be. For instance, we expect a chair to be sized for human beings to sit in and a teapot big enough to hold several cups of tea. Anything significantly larger or smaller than these expectations would be a change in scale.
Scale represents an interesting concept in that it makes note that we do have expectations about how big or small thing should be. That may sound like we have some kind of undue constraints placed upon those of us who create, but actually, scale gives us an opportunity to step outside those expectations and make a point.
As mentioned above, size can be used emphasize things. Making something bigger than expected usually draws attention, so if you created a beaded necklace with beads as big as golf balls, those are definitely beads that are bigger than normally expected.
The same concept of emphasis works with proportions. Let’s say that you only made one of those beads as big as a golf ball in the previously mentioned beaded necklace and the rest of the beads were of a more reasonable size. In that case, you would be drawing attention to the big bead as a focal point. Size allows you to direct the viewer’s eye and their impression of the work.
It may seem that bigger items will be more impressive or have a bigger impact but, honestly, very small artistic creations can be just as fascinating, sometimes more so due to the skill needed to create beauty in such a small space. I think you can see that in the opening image of this post. Small art requires the viewer to come close to it to really see the details, creating an intimacy between the viewer and the piece.
So, have you ever thought about these considerations for size when creating your work? Don’t worry if you haven’t. It’s not that uncommon for size to be determined in some arbitrary or organic manner. And I’m not saying that doing it that way is wrong, but you could be missing out on an opportunity to better express your intention if size was a conscious decision.
A Sizable Story
One of my high corset collars with stitched copper and polymer embellishments.
When I was a working artist, I often made decisions about size based on what I thought people would want. It wasn’t a particularly conscious choice, more of an aim not to make pieces too big. I was not trying to make statement jewelry, but rather something that could be comfortably worn all day, or so that was my train of thought.
I can’t say what got me to start thinking about size, but at some point, I started to ask myself why I was afraid to go big. So, I started to push myself, making big collar pieces that would sit as high as the jawline and come down to the collarbone. Some were a little crazy, some were so uncomfortable, but I still found so much joy in making all of them.
I found something freeing in pushing myself beyond what I thought my market would like. And, as it turned out, my market liked them big too. I sold every one that I put up for sale. They never came home with me after a show. So, what I discovered was that the sizes I had been working in were completely self-imposed without any supportable basis for my choices other than my own fear of not being able to make a sale.
Once I realized why I had been working in those smaller sizes, I was able to start making decisions based on what the work needed to be instead of what I thought the market might want. For example, if I was going to make an ornate piece with the intention that the wearer feel like a queen, I would probably decide that it should be big and bold, not small and delicate or demurely moderate, to better emphasize the feeling of nobility I wanted it to embody.
Georg Dinkel works large when he is trying to make a point about our reverence for technology, like with this iPhone docking station titled IReliquary.
What’s Your Size?
So why do you work in the sizes that you do?
Is it purely functionality or rooted in the idea of what people would expect the size to be?
Is it limited by the tools or forms you have on hand, or by the capability of the materials being used?
Do you let the size come about organically or unconsciously or do you make a conscious decision about size based on the impact or response you would like the viewer to have?
I truly don’t believe that there’s really a wrong way to determine the size of your work but, like any design element, you are only truly a master of it if you are aware of its possibilities and make conscious choices.
So maybe this week, think about the size of your artwork in terms of your intention. Look at pieces that you’ve made in the past and ask yourself how the look and message, if there was one, would have changed if the piece had been smaller or larger. And in the next few things that you design, ask yourself what size piece would best serve the artwork before letting your tools or expectations of scale determine it for you.
Goodies are About Gone
Support this blog and your creative endeavors … join the club!
If you didn’t see the newsletter yesterday, I shared the stock I have left for a few special items that were first offered to Art Boxer Club Members, but a couple things are sold out or nearly so already. These are limited items that I will periodically offer publicly, without the discounts or freebies club members get, when there is extra stock, so if you can’t join us in the club, keep your eye out for my newsletters and sign up here if you aren’t on that list for my next offering.
Getting first dibs as well as discounts and freebies is one of the advantages of being part of the Art Boxer clubs, along with the weekly mini-magazine pick me up you get in your email. (The Art Boxer Success club that includes coaching is also unavailable at this time as spots are full up but I do have a waiting list going – just write to me if interested.)
These limited supplies are available on this page if you are still interested.
All Quiet on this Western Front
I have little to report on the home front. I did go in in for a small surgery Thursday only to find out I’m going have to go back in six weeks or so from now to have it completed. Nothing is straightforward and simple this year, is it? So, just trying to make myself take it easy this weekend although I am just a horrible patient in that regard.
Next weekend, assuming nothing else weird happens, my better half and I are going to slip away for the weekend to test the camper van conversion we’ve been slowly working on. I do plan to put something for you together before I go so you should still be able to visit with me next Sunday.
In the meantime, all your hopes and plans, big or small, all go off as intended this week!
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Shing Yin Khor Title: Curiosity Cabinet #2
First of all, I have to shout out a thank you to all of you who have been reaching out to me while I am relatively out of commission this month. I received so many well wishes by email and messenger that I’ve not been able to answer you all yet and for that I do apologize! I’ve also received cards from as far away as New Zealand and even a book! I can’t tell you how touched I am! You all are so amazing and so supportive!
I feel almost guilty because while I deal with silly little stuff I could have prevented if I wasn’t such a workaholic, there are others of you out there are dealing with the really hard stuff like fibromyalgia or cancer. I just want you all to know that I’m thinking about those of you who are struggling with your own pain, debilitation, or illness as well. It is easier to get through the rough patches when you know so many people care! In fact, might I encourage you to reach out to someone you know who is having a hard time and just say you are thinking of them and wishing them well? Just those little words can do wonders for one’s spirit. It has for me!
Now let’s talk about pretty bits!
Do you have a bin or box of pieces and parts of your handiwork yet unfinished but which you are too in love with toss? If you regularly create, I can’t imagine that you don’t. But what exactly are we going to do with these pieces?
This is a question we all end up pondering at some point. Do we hold onto them, hoping that they will be just the thing needed someday or do we toss them? It can be quite the dilemma, one that even Marie Kondo can’t easily help with because, hey, these do spark joy for us! And we do see value in them, in that they represent our creativity and what we can accomplish. But do such little jewels of our work belong in a bin where we don’t get to admire them?
I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and came up with a few solutions of my own, but I am hardly alone in searching for and finding ways to display pieces that might not otherwise see the light too often. Let’s look at options for what you can do with your pretty little bits as well as how to extrapolate possibilities from what other people are doing for jewelry display in general.
Out into the Light
If you read and perused through your entire copy of Polymer Journeys 2019, you would have seen, at the very last entry, my contribution which is a display case of small exploratory items for which I had no particular use in mind when created. In other words, I created them without thinking “This is going to be a pendant,” or “This is going to be a set of earrings,” or “This is going to decorate a vessel.” I just made them to see what the material would do, most of which I liked, and which represented a little exploratory learning experience. I had already been tying bits onto ribbons and hanging them off the edge of my studio corkboard as little festive decorations but that didn’t work for the pieces that really only had one viewing angle as they would twist around on the ribbons.
Then I was out talking to the butterflies in my backyard (Yeah, I talk to the creatures in my yard. It’s a hazard of working alone from home all day. You’ll talk to anything!) and remembering how I used to catch and collect them in shadow boxes as a kid and it just randomly struck me that my little creative bits were like butterflies in a way. They are lovelies that I caught in a moment of exploratory creativity and in that small frame of time, they became a kind of an unexpected friend, going through that creative time with me. I didn’t want to toss my little friends even though I had no end-use for them. You don’t do that to friends! You hold onto them around and support each other, right?
Does that sound silly? Maybe it is, but it was revealing to me to realize that I kept certain pieces not because they were so beautiful or well done but more often because I felt connected to them. So, why not collect them and put them out like a collection of butterflies or a collage of photos of one’s friends? And this is what I started making. We find shadow boxes at garage sales and thrift stores for cheap and because they have character. I’ve made half a dozen of these so far.
By the way, I use a hot melt glue gun to tack the pieces onto a bit of mat board cut to fit the box. The nice thing about the hot melt glue is that if you do every want to take a piece out of the collection, you just pop it off the board and heat it up with a hairdryer to remove the glue from the back of the piece. So, your “friends” can come out and play in another piece or a new collection as you like!
If you don’t want to display pieces quick and easy, you could tack them up on a corkboard, as I bet many of you do already, but you can also make a nicer, more intentional display like this reed shade like Lauren Valenzuela does with this earring collection. Now, she is using this to photograph her collection, but you can pop up your bits by looping wire that ends in a hook around it. You could change out your collection on a whim that way. This is also a great idea for hanging up earrings, brooches, and necklaces so you can admire them even when not wearing them.
You can use collection displays or anything with dividers that can be hung on a wall. This would work especially well if you make little sculptures are pieces that would sit upright and are better seated then hung or glued but it can work with both as seen in the piece by Shing Yin Khor at the top of this post. Gerard Collas used an old printer’s letter set tray to display collections of his little wood sculptures.
You can also use wall art to display your artistic bits. This canvas covered with brooches is an ingenious display put together by Kathleen Dustin. She used this display in her show booth in 2016. I’m guessing she’s still using something of the sort because it’s just such a fabulous idea. But you could do the same basic thing with your bits. Get a canvas and have at it with paint or whatever you’d like, and attach your pretty bits, maybe with the hot melt glue gun or even hang it with the wire hook method. You could, alternately, find a finished piece of art, maybe at a thrift store or home goods store, and attach your pieces to that as it hangs on your wall.
Earlier this year, when I was in San Francisco, I saw this great wall of jewelry displayed on life-size artistic portraits. Again, this is showing completed work, but you could print out a large portrait image or, sketch or paint your own, and adorn and the image with your little lovelies or even with finished jewelry.
Now, if you simply have a lot of beads and bits that may not be your special “friends” but you have held on to them because you are sure someday they will come in handy (but maybe you are starting to lose faith in that idea), you can use them to create decorative wall pieces when used collectively. I didn’t know that this was a thing but there is a ton of this type of thing on Pinterest and general home craft blogs. People are doing everything from simply arranging spare bits into heart shapes to creating elaborate scenes in a kind of mosaic manner. Here is a fairly straightforward example fashioning tree imagery out of spare bits and bobs. It looks to have been created by Berdean Mante.
By the way, I found this jeweled topiary wall piece in an article about what to do with old vintage jewelry. It is all about creating wall art or decorating home decor objects with lots of pretty bits. If that interests you, pop over to that here.
So… Do I have your little wheels turning in your head? These should give you ideas not just for what to do with your extra bits but many of these could be a jumping-off point for creating your own unique show displays and photo setups.
Do you have a cool and unique way to display your extra bits or jewelry? Send me links to images if you do. Put it in the comments below, or if you’re reading this by email, click the header for this post to get to it on mine to leave a comment.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
In other very exciting news, we have our house back! The construction crew did last small tasks on Friday and for the first time in four months, I’m off to sleep in a full-size bed in an actual bedroom! I love my studio but I have spent nearly every hour of every day the last four months sleeping, eating, and working from here. I’ve been getting a little more than stir crazy! But now, we basically have to move back into her house. I hadn’t thought about how the post-construction time was going to be like moving into a new place but, of course, it is because it is basically a new place. So, I have tons to do and did not have time to take pictures for you yet, but I will take some pictures for next week when it’s kind of back altogether.
Hopefully, I didn’t make too many mistakes in this post. I am dead tired and sneezey from all the cleaning and raising of dust. And yes, I am being good and cleaning away with my left hand to spare the bad right one. Well, mostly. I do forget sometimes, mostly because the pain has diminished a ton from not being on the computer all day. So, the break is working thus far, at least for my arm! The pre-diabetes has been tougher to crack but I am determined! Having a full kitchen back and a real bed to sleep in should contribute greatly to all that. Yay!
So, until next week, I hope you have fun with the display ideas!
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Monika Duchowicz’s Slavic Village polymer journal cover
Have you ever gone to a foreign country and found yourself talking like them after being there awhile? It might just be the phrasing but perhaps you take on accents or hand gestures as well. It’s natural to adopt accents and ways of speaking when you are around it a lot. That’s how you learned to talk as a baby and your brain doesn’t completely turn off that learning from what you hear around you.
This phenomenon can happen with things other than language too. As fashion and décor changes around us, we may find our tastes get tweaked along with them. When we peruse social media sites and see artwork online, we may adopt a tendency towards certain types of design, colors, and forms. This can happen over time or even over the course of a day. That means that what you see online and around you can effect what you create.
So how do you keep your own voice and your style unaltered? Well, you can’t, really. Our aesthetic is formed from our interaction with our world but we can do something about the dominance of other influences over our own unique and personal voice. But it’s like muscle memory and that takes regular practice.
Ages ago, I read a book written in 1920 (whose title and author I have shamefully forgotten) on how to be a writer. The author had one line that really struck me. After stating he explained that a writer must get up every morning and, before doing anything else including getting out of bed, he or she must write at least a page of what we would now call free-writing, because this was the only way to insure the writer would wrote with their own voice later in the day. The section ended with him saying, “If you cannot get up and write a page every morning, then you are not a writer.”
At that point, a writer was all I wanted to be, so, fearful that I would not prove up to the task and therefore, I’d never be a real writer (I was rather young and impressionable then), I took that line to heart and I wrote every morning, no matter what, for what was probably about 10 years. Getting married and having a family kind of threw me off the habit but I do try to go back to it each time I stray.
When I don’t do this exercise, I do find that my day to day interactions find their way into my creative work. I found out early on that if I didn’t write in the morning, or tried writing fiction or poetry after a long day of reading academic books or writing training manuals, my writing would feel awkward or stilted. It just didn’t sound like me.
I think this influence of other art we see during the day can similarly affect the art we create as well. So, as part of my morning ritual now, I write for 10-15 minutes and then sketch for about the same amount of time. It is a very pleasant way to wake up and, in the process, I flex my unique voice and get my brain geared up for creative work. I don’t always have time to work in the studio but at least every day I am flexing that visual creative muscle and, I find, it makes my creative time easier to get into when I do get to go play.
Even if you aren’t able to spend productive time creating every day, I think you would find that a morning sketch, a quick “clay doodle” (just sitting at the studio table, playing with your clay for 15 minutes), or just journaling about design ideas will go a long way to concrete you personal voice. It will also show you what you are drawn to or might give you some really unique ideas for new designs. It’s something I would highly encourage.
So, would you be up for that? If you choose to write or sketch in the mornings, you can increase your motivation by creating a beautifully covered sketchbook or journal. And since polymer clay lends itself so well to decorating just about anything, why not make a beautiful cover for a blank book, and then keep it by your bedside? With a gorgeous tome to work in, you’re sure not to miss out on a very useful and fulfilling bit of creative exercise.
A Book and It’s Cover
The first person who comes to mind when talking of polymer covered journals is Aniko Kolesnikova aka Mandarin Duck. She does some of the most interesting and detailed journal covers you can find in polymer these days. And she doesn’t do just the front. She covers the back quite often, like on this one here.
If you are the sculptural type and want a ton of ideas to get you going on a cover design of your own, check out Aniko’s Flickr photostream. If you want more than just ideas, go to her Etsy page for tutorials, including one for that gorgeous peacock cover that was featured in Polymer Journeys 2019.
The other person that comes readily to mind for polymer covered books, and is one of my early influencers, is Chris Kapono, who, like Aniko, also has an affinity for the word Mandarin for some reason, her shop being Mandarin Moon. Chris’ covers are a riotous mixed-media decoration of polymer with glass cabochons, metal charms, beads, and, sometimes, hand-drawn decoration, as you see in the border of this book below.
Books are a perfect canvas for Chris’ style of decorative polymer. She shares her process as well, through tutorials on her Etsy site and in publications such as her tremendous contribution to the Polymer Art Projects – Organics book.
If you would like to create a cover with a more painterly approach, you might aspire to the work of Monika Duchowicz. Her polymer paintings are masterful but she kindly shares process shots on her Instagram account and was so kind to create a tutorial for her style of polymer painting for The Polymer Arts in the Summer 2017 issue.
Here’s another painterly polymer artist, Zhanna Bessonova, who likes to go really large. I just didn’t want you to think it had to be a small journal or sketchbook. Pick the size of the book you want to write or draw in first, then decide the cover.
I know, I know … the work of these very talented ladies might be intimidating to some people but remember, the whole idea is to make something that can help you find and/or hold onto your unique voice so you certainly don’t need to make covers like these—make them your way! Whatever you can create on a flat sheet of polymer can become a journal cover. Create a cover with a mosaic of textured squares, tons of polymer dots, rhinestones, polymer ‘embrodiery or, heck, canes will do, of course! Strangely enough, I couldn’t really find anyone doing cane covered books. I thought clayers had hit everything with cane slices! They must be out there somewhere! (If you know of some, share the links to them in the comments at the end of this post. Click the header if you are getting this by email.)
Also keep in mind, your cover doesn’t have to be complicated. And it doesn’t have to be polymer. Use whatever you like and do as much or as little as you like on it. Look at this lovely but simple book by a French crafter who goes by shop name alone – Avenuedes Fantaisies. It’s just a polymer honeycomb background and some fun rhinestone bees that were probably pins at one time, but it feels joyful.
You really can attach anything you want to your book cover. It’s for you, so if you are up for the challenge, make it yours!
New Issue of The Polymer Studio, coming late July
If you haven’t seen the new cover roaming about social media, here it is! Debbie Crothers’s acrylic on polymer beads grace the front for issue #3. We also have tutorials by Christi Friesen, Anita Long, Beatriz Cominatto, Kathy Koontz and Nika Nakit. There is also a fascinating interview with Beatriz, Brazil’s premiere polymer artist with a branded line of polymer clay, and a peek into the studio of master miniature artist, Angie Scarr. Plus much more.
Start or renew subscriptions or pre-order a copy on the website here.
Painter for a Day
I am off to paint a bathroom today then back to polishing the next issue. We might have a fully functional bathroom by the end of the day Monday but only if I can get this part done today. It’s not that the contractors couldn’t paint it but, well, I’m cheaper—I just require some yummy baked goods and a good audiobook or podcast and I’ll work away! And, honestly, I will do a better job. When it’s your place, you just take extra care with things. So, I am off. Enjoy your Sunday and have a beautiful week! I hope you get up every morning before your mind is otherwise influenced, and you write or create something just for yourself. You deserve it!
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Tanya Mayorova
Given the choice, would you create a necklace that was easy and quick to make and was still stunning, or would you explore an unknown technique with an unknown outcome that might take hours or days? For some of you, the answer may be complicated because you like to explore and you don’t even question how long it will take or whether you will be successful because you just want to see what material can do. I get that. That’s pretty much how I approach what I do. Not that I wouldn’t mind some of my explorations being quick and easy and more often successful than not. Being challenged and failing, though, are absolutely necessary parts of creating art but that doesn’t mean that everything we make should be frustrating and difficult.
I think, by default, we all gravitate toward the easy option when given a clear-cut choice. Easy means less frustration, less room for error, and less time involved but it can also be considered a bad choice. And I’m not just talking about the creative process. For instance, you might grab a paper plate instead of one that you have to wash, or you toss your groceries in a plastic bag provided by the store rather than bringing in your own reusable one. Those examples highlight the reason for our environmental issues right now, our desire for ease and convenience being at the root of our environmental tragedies. So, yes, taking the easy route can sometimes have a negative effect that that’s not always true. There is nothing wrong with choosing the easiest route to drive home or having yoga pants and a T-shirt as your default attire when not at work. And some very easy things are actually better. Fruit and a boiled egg for breakfast is a lot easier than making pancakes and bacon and is better for you too. And when creating your polymer components, simple techniques and forms are often not only an efficient way to create and express yourself but they allow you to concentrate on composition, contrast, form, and other design elements rather than getting you wrapped up in technique.
With social media and our online access to so much artwork, I think our minds are saturated with certain ideas about what we should be creating and, because of that, we may have a hard time finding our own voice or we may have an unconscious sense of how pieces should look or be put together rather than finding a look of our own. Or we are romanced by gorgeous, complex pieces so we try to make our work more complex as well without knowing if simple elements may be very thing we need to do or say what we want.
Part of the problem comes from the idea that simple and easy means boring. But it certainly doesn’t have to be. To illustrate this, I’d like to look at beads today. In polymer jewelry, the bead is the most basic element you work with. The idea of a bead encompasses all types of forms though, from the simple round bead to complex sculpted and layered mixed-media elements. But let’s explore the more classic idea of a bead, as a single element that is repeated in some fashion in a piece of adornment and let’s see how you might create easy beads that are anything but basic and boring.
A little note … Some of you long time polymer enthusiasts out there may recognize a few of these pieces as several were widely circulated back when but, even if you’ve seen these before, look at them with new eyes and see if some familiar techniques but unused techniques aren’t worth a revisit now. You’ll approach them differently than you did 5 or 10 years ago, and you never know what serendipitous discovery might be unearthed.
Beads Beyond the Basic
Round beads are, of course, the most common bead form and are a classic that are always great for showing off canes, color, and surface design. Still, round beads can get pretty complicated, one, because it can be difficult to make them perfectly round, and secondly, because to keep them from being boring often leads us to add complexity in the color scheme or how the surface is treated. But what if you took your round bead and just worked on the form? Go ahead … grab some clay, make a rough round bead, and then start messing with the form. Pinch it, press it, pull it, or roll it into a variation on a round bead or cure and carve it.
Genevieve Williamson started out with a round bead to create these side textured chunky disks. Just look at the variation here plus I bet you can think up a few other ways to quickly and easily change them up with different clays, inclusions, or texturing of the sides.
Tube beads can be a tad tricky, primarily when it comes to creating the hole for stringing them. An extruder with a core adapter makes the job much easier but you can also create easy, attractive, and unique tube beads from any surface treated clay sheet simply by wrapping a strip around a tube of your choosing. Here’s a whole selection by Tonya Mayorova who went really wide with her bead openings. As you can see, all kind of surface treatments adapt well to these wide tube beads, from mosaics like you see on the bottom of the stack, to carved, impressed, mokume gane, and seed bead wrapped. The beads here are all similar in width but she uses the same approach with skinnier varieties such as in the necklace that opens this post.
Tanya doesn’t have a tutorial posted for this, but I can help you with that:
- Pick a favorite surface treatment to create a sheet of clay with and then wrap the sheet around anything that can go in the oven. I keep a few pieces of aluminum and copper tubing for just such projects. Make sure the pieces are straight and have unobstructed lengths so beads can slide off after curing.
- Wrap the clay around the tube until the clay sheet overlaps then cut down through the length of the overlapping clay and then remove the excess clay.
- Carefully blend the seam where the ends meet.
- If the clay sheet has a smooth and even surface, you can lay it on the worksurface and, using a tissue blade, let it roll crosswise under the blade ‘s edge to cut each individual bead cut. Then just cure the stack as is.
- Alternately, you can cure just after you blend the seam then cut the beads off it with a craft knife or slide it off the rod and use a jeweler’s saw to cut your beads.
- You can string your tubes on multiple strands of stringing materials such as cording or leather thongs, a selection of various colored embroidery thread, colored Tigers tail, ribbon, etc.
Tanya has even more variations of this idea ready for your perusal on her Flickr photostream here. She also recently agreed to create a feature tutorial for Issue #3 of The Polymer Studio so be sure to subscribe or keep up your subscription to the magazine to get that beautiful project.
The beads below also require just a sheet of treated clay. These are similar to a popular paper bead technique you may have seen as well. They start with a sheet cut into narrow, long triangles that are then rolled up, starting with the wide end so that each overlap leaves part of the surface of the lower layer visible. It works with any sheet of polymer, treated or untreated, textured or not.
I love how Margit Bohmer keeps the triangles, created from a mokume gane sheet, really narrow so that the beads are nearly as big in diameter as they are wide. There is still plenty of surface showing but they blend into each other because the narrow bead doesn’t angle away as much at the point where they touch. As you likely already know, the longer the bead, the more space you’ll see between the bottom edges of the bead ends. These rolled up beads are also angled on their ends which can make them sit askew but the shallower the angle (like on these narrower beads) the more neatly they line up.
Margit has created the longer beads as well so you can compare them here or just look through her Flickr photostream to see what you like better. And if you want a full polymer tutorial on these types of beads, check out Emma Ralph’s classic tutorial here.
Another, maybe even easier, way to use sheeted clay for beads is to just roll up flat sections of clay without overlapping, in a loose, freeform way. This works really nicely with an organic treatment or texture. Just look at how lovely these wrapped textured beads are. They are simply flat sections of polymer impressed on a handmade texture plate and curled up on an angle.
These are created by Rebekah Payne who generously posted a tutorial here on how to make them.
A similar concept can be employed with snakes of clay. Just roll out or extrude lengths of solid, marbled, mica shift (see this post from earlier this month) or striped polymer and then wrap the strands up on a skewer, long thin knitting needle, or other thin rod and cure. You’ll end up with coiled beads like these created by Emma Todd, below..
You can also roll the beads, after wrapping them up, back and forth under an acrylic block or other small tile to level the strands, creating a smooth bead surface. Don’t use the rod to roll the bead as it will act like a rolling pin on the inside of it and widen the stringing hole. Unless you want that. You can also take them off the rod and gently press their length between thumb and forefinger to compress the coils a bit more and make flat ended cylindrical beads.
The interior of clay beads have a lot of hidden potential too, and they can so easily and quickly be revealed by just cutting them open. Here is my all-time favorite example of creating stunning beads by cutting the form. These fabulous beads are by Desiree McCrorey. Click the image to see her tutorial for this. Be sure to check out the beads she makes from the cut scraps at the end too!
Not only can you create simple yet complex looking beads by cutting stacks, you can use this technique with old canes as well. See Desiree’s tutorial for the same beads using canes here. And look around the site for other great tutorials. These are all older tutorials, but timeless techniques.
Beads Away!
The examples above are all easy to make, don’t take much time, and allow for your own take on composition, contrast, texturing, etc. So, I would like to suggest that you pick a couple you like and see if you can sneak in sometime today or this coming week to try them out to see which, if any, simple but expressive beads suit you.
There are also some publications you might want to check out if you are on a bead making bender or feel you will be after all this.
- My favorite polymer bead book is Carol Blackburn’s Making Polymer Clay Beads. There are beads for all levels of clayers and lots of jumping off points for those who like to explore.
- Although these get a bit more complex, the beads in Grant Diffendaffer’s book, Polymer Clay Beads are just stunning and there are so many tips in this book.
- If you really just want to try some new surface treatments or get other ideas for changing up your own bead ideas, Marie Segal’s, The Polymer Clay Artist’s Guide, is such a thorough exploration of techniques. It’s my go to book for creative brainstorming on polymer treatments.
- Of course, there are tons of ideas in The Polymer Studio and, especially for the more exploratory folks, in the back issues of The Polymer Arts. Grab a few of these in print or digital and let serendipity lead you into new creative territory. By the way, about 65% of The Polymer Arts issues are still available in print but quite a few are about to sell out completely so if you like your material in print, snatch them up while I still have them.
- For further inspiration in the form of eye-candy, pick up your copy of Polymer Journeys 2016 and/or 2019. Both are just brimming with ideas of all kinds. If you need a copy, get them on the website here.
Holes
Our foreman, standing guard at the pit to our main drain line in our front yard … there’s another guy down there!
For those of you mildly entertained by the situation here at Tenth Muse central, all I have to report is, well, holes. I counted 8 points of egress big enough for the entry of adventurous birds or, in 2 cases, an adventurous racoon, thanks to the workers punching through our walls for new plumbing and a new electrical panel. Its kind of unnerving to stand in the middle of one’s house and see so many wide-open entries into the space.
There are also some deep holes! The nearly 3 foot deep hole in the master bath is big enough for a couple suitcases of cash (like I have enough cash even in single dollar bills to fill a couple suitcases, not after all this work!) but the 7 foot deep one in the front yard is ready for hiding bodies. Or maybe just my entire stash of failed art projects. That craziness has us now investigating xeriscaping and ground cover plants because between the trench and the well at the end of it (and all the dug up soil covering the area around it), that grass ain’t coming back. It didn’t grow well there anyways. So now we are plant shopping. I never much liked shopping before (unless if was for art materials!) but, man, am I getting burned out on that particular activity. The shopping part, not the plants. I’ve been enjoying my plants, with all the spring flowers in bloom. The garden has been my escape from all the chaos and noise!
However, in all this, I have managed to clear up the studio table and started working on new stuff! It’s amazing what can happen when you don’t have distracting chores like housecleaning (although I miss having a house to clean!) Keep an eye on my personal Instagram page for new pieces and, hopefully, new poetry to accompany it. Find me @thesagearts
Now off to enjoy a rare cool and rainy Sunday. I hope you have a beautiful Sunday to relax in and a great week ahead!
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Do you ever stop to ask yourself if what you create makes you happy? It seems like a silly question since creating is usually passion driven so being able to feed that passion should make you happy, right? But have you ever found yourself creating something because you believe it is the kind of thing other people would like but later realize that you don’t enjoying making it?
I found that happened a lot when I was a selling artist. You get wrapped up in what you think the market would want, what you think will sell best at the next show, and you’d be just making things for the money and not because it’s what you want to make. Other times we think that in a particular material, like polymer clay, it is best used for certain forms such as jewelry and home decor. But as we all know, polymer can do almost anything and yet 85% of it being created and shared online is jewelry. Jewelry is pretty fun stuff to make, sure, but if you enjoy polymer, just keep in mind you don’t have to make jewelry.
I myself have been moving away from jewelry. A pendant or pair of earrings are oftentimes still the best items to create to show off a polymer technique for a magazine article or tutorial but more and more, I create objects without an end goal in mind and am really enjoying just making little objects and samples of techniques. Last year, I started to see patterns and connections between them and eventually started putting them in shadow boxes. You can see an example of one of my “specimen” boxes in the latest Polymer Journeys book, if you’re curious. I’m also trying to devise a class for doing it. It’s so much fun!
But when I have to create jewelry because I am vetting an article for the magazine or want to make a gift, I have lately found that I don’t look forward to the engineering of it – figuring out how it is going to hang, what stringing material will work best, what findings I need, as well as worrying about comfort and durability. I find I don’t want to think about those things when I create and it’s not out of some kind of laziness, it’s just not what I want to spend my mental and creative energy on, and I’m good with that. I just really want to follow creative paths that make me happy right now.
To that end (and because I’ve spent so much time in tile stores lately), I’ve decided I might just focus on tiles for a while. They are a very freeing form. A tile is just a canvas for 3D materials. You can do whatever you want on them. You can make them any size, any shape, and can attach whatever you want or attack it however you want. I think we really should all give ourselves the freedom to play with this form, to let ourselves be free to create from the heart with a material we love. At the end of a session of tile making, you may find you are really looking forward to creating necklaces or making beads or covering vases. But I am going to suggest you give a tile a try here and there to just let yourself create freely. Doing this can help with your designs in other forms.
To that end, of course, I’m going to share some tiles this weekend. I am going to share a lot of non-polymer ones because I think, if you’ve spent any time online, you’ve probably seen your share of polymer tiles these last few years, especially with the Fimo 50 year challenge a couple of years back and with the common inches exchanges (inches are just tiny tiles). So, I’ve got a quite a mix for you but it is all art that can translate to polymer even if it is in another material.
Laying it All Out
The opening image of this post is a photo from a class conducted by Laurie Mika. She is well-known for her colorful and intricate collage/mosaic pieces which, by the way, she teaches at various events. This collection of student work was from a polymer clay tapestry class she taught at the SAMA (Society of American Mosaic Artists) conference in Nashville just a few of weeks ago. They are all just lovely. There is no high-end technical skill needed to put these types of things together which makes them ideal for exploring color and texture and just letting yourself go. (You can check Laurie’s workshop schedule on her website.)
Jael Thorp caught my eye some years back with her “clay doodles”, including the one below. I thought they looked like zentangles for clayers. Can you imagine the flow state she must’ve been in to create this? You can just get so completely lost in this kind of work and that is a big part of why people find tiles such a wonderful creative outlet.
Check out this post with her various doodles from some years back. She went on to refine her technique, making beautiful beads and home decor with the same type of application. You can find them on her Flickr photostream.
Let’s move from polymer to ceramics now. It is a rare thing in ceramics that can’t be replicated in some fashion in polymer so I find ceramic art quite inspiring. Here is one of my favorite tile makers in ceramics, Chris Gryder, who has gone a bit more three-dimensional of late but his tile compositions are timeless.
In this composition, each tile is its own separate piece but he’s connected them all with these lines that he creates through the grid of tiles. So, really, you can make a whole bunch of tiles without worrying about what they’re going to end up as, and then, if you want to put them together as a composition because they have a similar or complementary set of color palettes, textures, or motifs, you can use lines that flow throughout to visually connect them for a larger composite composition. This approach would allow you to just make tiles as the muse directs and then you can later make them into a larger wall piece.
If you like this piece, go browse through his website or his Instagram page for more fantastic inspiring wall compositions in tile.
Keep in mind, just because tiles start out flat, they are not two-dimensional and you can create extremely three-dimensional pieces on them. Here’s one example with some very organic forms and textures created by Lauren Blakey, another ceramic artist.
And here’s another three-dimensional example in glass by Shayna Leib.
As you can see, tile work is open to all types of materials so keep that in mind as you sit down to tile. Mix in anything that your heart and muse desires. Mix and match mediums, embed oddball trinkets you’ve kept for, as yet, unknown reasons, and just keep an open mind.
After pulling these examples for you, I realized that all the examples are squares here. You don’t have to create square tiles to play with but that is the more common form. However, if you’re not feeling square, try a free form shape or an oblong one or maybe, because today is Mother’s Day, create a big heart for all the mothers out there. Happy Mother’s Day to all you amazing women!
Here’s a heart from Tina Ruppert of Wisecrackin’ Mosaics on Etsy. Pick a favorite shape and a bunch of canes or other scraps of clay and you can do something along these lines as well.
Getting Squared Away
I’m going to leave you with these thoughts and hopefully some curiosity about playing around with a tile or two, in whatever form and techniques interest you. If you need some jumpstart tutorials, here are a few places you can go:
Sara Evans has a video about her tile making process here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FAxYwgJfLo
If you want to do something tile like but still want it to be something functional when done, maybe you would like this polymer clay tile box tutorial –
https://mermaidsden.com/blog/2015/02/12/polymer-clay-tile-box
Or have fun with one of our true masters of polymer clay tiles, Chris Kapono, with her very detailed and yet tremendously fun tile project in the Polymer Arts Projects book which you can purchase and download digitally if you need it immediately or order the print edition from our website.
I opened with a discussion about doing what makes you happy and hope it gives you some food for thought. If you want to hear a couple of transformative stories in that vein, please be sure to get your copy of The Polymer Studio Issue #2, recently released, which starts and ends with stories about finding one’s happy place with one about Christine Dumont’s studio complete with a visual tour, and the other about Donna Greenberg’s focus moving from jewelry to large wall art. Check out the Issue #2 Sampler if you haven’t seen the new issues yet.
We’re daily trying to find are happy place over here as our house has continued to be demolished more and more, beyond what we (or our contractor) expected even. Old plumbing can be a tricky thing! If it would just warm up here, it wouldn’t be so bad. A cold Southern California in May is just weird.
I’d share progress shots of the house but it’s pretty much just down to studs and busted up concrete floors. Oh… And a large trench across the whole of the front yard for a new drain line. I’m thinking about making it into a moat. Like a habitrail (if you remember those hamster houses) for our pond fish. They could just swim circles around the house! Okay, probably not but gotta have fun with all this bedlam, even if it’s just dreaming up nonsense like that!
I hope you all have a wonderful Sunday and Mother’s Day! I’m off to have mimosas with the family’s fabulous females myself! Enjoy the day and your coming week!
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How do you feel in the space in which you create? This has been on my mind quite a bit lately – not just the function of a space but how it feels and even how it represents us. I’ve decided to let that thought guide us into a slightly different type of blog this week.
As you might have read in the previous post or two, there are some changes going on at the homestead here where Tenth Muse Arts is based and we’re about to start tearing out walls and then, of course, rebuilding in that space. So, of course, my husband and I have been asking ourselves, “What do we want in this space?”. Well, we want a lot of things but there is a budget, and it is not particularly large, so we have been talking through what is most important to us. It has turned into a very interesting conversation, one that goes beyond paint colors and cabinet styles.
After addressing the functionality of the space we have to repair and rebuild – because of it doesn’t function nothing else is going to work out well – my husband and I followed the logical path and started talking about color, materials and placement. By the end of the conversation though, we were talking about emotion. It may be because we are both artists that we backed out to ask how we wanted it to feel followed by the details that would make the space fulfill that wish. This is the space we live in (and where I work as well) and we want the home to feel comfortable, like shrugging on a comfortable but well-tailored coat that hangs great and hugs you in all the right places.
With this on our minds, Brett walked into my studio the other day and simply said “This just feels good.” And I knew why he said that. This is what we are after. Not in the style or color scheme but the inviting, comfortable feeling of the space. I have to agree, my work space does feel good but it has not always been so. It’s taken me a long time to realize the importance of creating a space that is as comfortable as my favorite coat, arranging things not just to be functional but to feed my spirit as well.
Up until we moved here a couple of years ago, I had always worked on the business and created my art in a basement or a garage – some kind of windowless, very utilitarian space (the opening photo is a shot of my windowless basement studio in Colorado) – primarily because it was the only unclaimed living space available. Although I would try to decorate, it was never a priority so it mostly didn’t happen. However, those kinds of spaces could be very hard to work in as I usually worked every waking hour there and it would get depressing, not being able to see the outside world. It would make me restless and that wasn’t good for productivity. But what choice did I have?
As it turned out, I have a lot more choices than I allowed myself. My husband made me see that. He is an animation artist and director as well as being the son of antique dealers. Both his vocation and upbringing are in things that consider space, a lot. Telling a story in animation is very dependent on how the characters and the viewer’s eye moves through the space of the frame and antiques are about decorating and so he is always arranging and rearranging the house and coming home with things to bring in more personality.
Watching him made me think about my mostly utilitarian space and how little I did with it. So, with his help, I started bringing in plants to sit in the cold corners and printed fabrics to drape over the bookcases. We even pulled in an old oriental rug to go under my non-polymer desk area. It changed everything. This was when I was working in a garage (so yeah, the plants were fake or under a grow light but then, I had the look of sunlight in the corners!) When I got the wonderful space I now work in, I really took it up a notch and so now, yep, it just feels good!
Many of you are probably in situations where the space you create in may not ideal however, you can still make it your own and you can still make it feel good, inspiring, and a place that makes you happy. What that means is up to you and what is most important. You might want it very organized with matching furniture and color coordinated accents to make you feel good or you might like the freedom to make a mess on your thrift store tables and mismatched storage bins. You might prefer to stick with utilitarian but keep a collection of favorite things on a nearby shelf to inspire you.
The question really is, have you considered what you can do with, or to, your space to make it feel good (or better) to you? Because a comfortable space is far more conducive to being productive and creative than one that is cold, cramped, awkward, or just boring.
To that end, this week, I’d like to peek in on some studios.
The Grand Tour
To start us off I’m going to I pulled this out of an hour-long bonus video I gave to continuing subscribers from The Polymer Arts and adventurous new subscribers to The Polymer Studio magazine late last year. This is a jazzy visual tour of my studio and office space, complete with boppy background music, a peek into the backyard retreat just outside my door, and an introduction to my furry in-house staff.
You’ll see I’ve stuffed a lot into this one room and it’s two walk-in closet areas, but I’ve been sure to include touches of things that make me happy everywhere. From my collection of oddities on the mantle to the jars of random materials on my jewelry cabinet to the display of all my SLR cameras from over the decades, the space is very much me and is a joy to go into every day.
I personally have always been fascinated with the spaces people create in. They feel so personal, like a little window into the mind and soul of that person. So when I first started The Polymer Arts back in 2011, I knew I wanted to do an issue all about the spaces that we work in. I figured it would be of interest to others as well, not just for voyeuristic reasons, but because it could make us feel more connected. And I sure was right! The Spring 2012 – Creative Spaces issue sold out in print quicker than any other and is still one of the most downloaded of our digital back issues.
You can really see the personality of the artists that participated in that issue. For instance, it was no surprise to see that Christi Friesen’s space was full of knickknacks and collected bits of art and all kinds of books. She is a high energy person and with an insatiable curiosity so it makes sense that she should surround herself with things that she loves and that inspire her. You can see a bit of this in the first page from her section of that issue.
By the way, Christi is actually between studios right now, or you can say the whole world is her studio as she travels all over this year, searching for the answer to how one keeps creating while traveling. You can follow her shenanigans replete with mini classes and demos in her new members only Virtual Creative Experience here.
When the photos from Leanne and Paul Stoddard at Swirly Designs came in for that Spring 2012 issue, I was not surprised to see the orderliness and organization of their studio. The ornaments they create are designed with tremendous care with a focus on whimsy – and so is their space. Their studio looks like something put together for an interior design TV show with its coordinated color scheme complete with matching white furniture and energetic sparks of red tucked in here and there. Oh … and lots of Christmas trees, just everywhere!
Now, when I asked Bettina Welker to share her space, I was not sure what to expect. As it turned out, she was also working in a basement like I was at the time. The importance of functionality is obvious and there is not much room left for decor but she has a great wall of sketches, photos and and design ideas that she keeps up for inspiration. It actually inspired me at the time to create something similar for myself. It makes so much sense!
All these studio peeks are fun stuff, right? The popularity of that issue always stuck with me, so when I was determining the concept of the new magazine, I decided that the spaces that we work in should be a regular feature and that’s how the name, The Polymer Studio, came about. The next issue of The Polymer Studio, coming out in a few weeks, features Christine Dumont’s studio and the interesting journey she took to create the space she now works in. (We’ll be sending in the mailing list for the first round of the new issue to be mailed directly from the printer on Friday, so get your subscription or pre-order your copy now to be one of the first to get it in your hot little hands!)
So, what is your approach to how you set up or decorate your creative work space? Even if you can only snag the end of the dining room table after dinner, that corner should be conducive to productive creativity. Maybe you can keep some of your favorite pieces out where you can see them to be motivated by your successes. If you can, hang pictures or put out objects with colors, textures, and forms that excite you. Make your space as physically comfortable as you can and reconsider the placement of your tools and materials if getting to them is difficult or even just a minor hassle. Doing a little spring cleaning and reorganizing and reevaluating your space might be just the thing to add that extra spark of energy and excitement to your creative time and your work right now.
More Voyeuristic Opportunities
Here’s a few more links to other studio tours for you to peer in on. Even if you studio is just how you want it, peeking in is just fun.
In 2016, Katie Oskin of Kater’s Acres invited people into her studio with a personal tour video, seen below. You’ll notice that she also has a couch in her studio. I know mine feels like such a necessity now. Can you fit one into your space? Or do you have one already? (If you have one, leave a comment! I’d love to see how many of you also thought a cozy sitting (and nap!) space was needed.
Ginger Davis Allman takes you into her studio on this post of hers but it’s focused on her tools and materials more so than the physical space. But doesn’t that tell you a lot about what’s important to Ginger?
And here’s a post full of photos of Debbie Crother’s studio. You’ll read that she’s really big on recycled and environmentally friendly furniture and organizers. She also has a lovely, dedicated display of her work. But what strikes me is that she has sooo much space! Having a builder for a husband sure has it’s benefits!
Okay gang… I have to run off now. I need to finish putting together the next issue of The Polymer Studio (and finish clearing the kitchen for demolition!) If you have not subscribed to the magazine yet and have had any inclination to do so, I would so love for you to join me there. You subscription and book purchases support the creation of this blog and all the artists that we are working to support in turn, plus you get inspiration and tons of eye candy for yourself!
In the meantime, have fun considering what more you could do with your space to encourage your creativity and enjoyment of your time creating. If you’ve posted about your space anywhere we can go check out online, leave it in a comment here. We’d all love to come e-visit!
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We have a bit of business to do first today but it’s exciting business! I wanted to share with you the next cover of The Polymer Studio, coming late April.
We are thrilled to include projects from Cynthia Tinapple, our featured and interviewed artist for this issue, as well as Christi Friesen, Kathy Koontz, Elena Mori, the Mitchell sisters, Deb Hart, and Wendy Moore. Also, tips, tricks, and other bits of wisdom from Debbie Crothers, Ginger Davis Allman, and little old me. And you won’t want to miss the tour of Christine Dumont’s studio, complete with a conversation about her space and process, which I think you’ll find very intriguing.
All this and more, just a month away! Support our projects, this blog, and the betterment of your own polymer journey, of course, or just because you’d like to look at all the pretty things tucked into those pages, by subscribing to The Polymer Studio here.
(Be sure to scroll down to the last section for the 33% off sale stuff.)
A Fine Mix-up
So, did you get a chance to look through the winning entries for the IPCA awards? Here’s the link again if you didn’t see them. The winning entries are just beautiful and maybe even a bit surprising. If you saw it, did you notice any trends or changes in trends and what was presented? I thought it was interesting that there were a lot of mixed-media pieces where polymer clay might have been the focus, but other materials played large roles in important design aspects and visual impact of the work.
One of the reasons I find this so interesting is that the idea of expanding into other materials seems to be a regular conversation myself and many other people are having. I couldn’t say exactly what that means but I do believe that polymer, with its unparalleled flexibility for combining with other materials, has kind of come of age where our exploration of what it can do is being placed on the back burner in order to focus on artistic expression. I look at these mixed-media pieces in the awards and other pieces I find during my research and general perusing online, and it seems that we are seeing more instances where polymer centric artists decide what they want to make and then determine the best materials for the work rather than push to see if polymer can be used for most, if not all, of the components of a piece. Or perhaps I am just hoping this is the case because I would love to see more folks focused on personal expression will rather than letting our obsessive, but understandable, infatuation with the material determine our creative parameters.
Of course, for most of us who work in polymer now, this colorful, durable, and chameleon material will remain our primary love and, regardless of other options, we will often still try to do as much as we can with polymer, if just to see if we can push it a little bit farther. But, opening oneself up to the possibilities of combining it with other materials in major ways will allow us, and even the viewer, to focus more on the design and expression and less on the material itself, which will let the artist’s expression, vision, creativity, and aesthetic really shine. I find this very exciting!
So, this week, let’s look at some of the mixed-media pieces where other materials play a primary role alongside polymer. This could be very helpful for you if you have felt like you’re in a rut or are too often hitting technical or design walls in your work. Trying out a different material may just be the thing to inject you with new enthusiasm and, possibly, send you down a new path with your artwork.
Mixed Directions
Let’s first look at some of the winners of the IPCA awards and in many ways that other materials have been mixed in.
This first piece is both a mixed-media and a mixed artist piece. Ellen Prophater or worked with Sherry Mozer, a glass artist, led to the use of the black glass piece with its shades of green within reflected in the mokume polymer it sits upon. It is set in a silver bezel and accented with Swarovski crystals. Both the mokume and the glass show off a subtle transparency, drawing the connection between the two along with the green cast colors. It’s a nice reminder that collaboration can also push us in new directions making new discoveries in our work and even ourselves and our friendships.
Donna Greenberg just killed it as the professional mixed-media category. This wall piece is called Wedgewood Wave but the word that keeps coming to mind for me is swoon. Not just because I feel like swooning, it’s just so gorgeous, but that’s also the word that comes to mind from that fabulous flow of energy through those waves, back into the pool of blue. Those waves are paper, but the application of color and shape are similar to the polymer pieces so the different materials feel cohesive. This is definitely one of those cases where another medium was the better choice. Trying to create those waves in polymer would’ve been just silly, even though it could be done. The paper gives a lighter feel to the overall piece as well as a light and easy flow to the visual movement. She also used Ultralight polymer alongside the Arches cold press paper, acrylic gouache paints, watercolor pencils, and Apoxie paste, each material fulfilling its purpose in a way that another material would not have been as successful with.
With the issue of the environment heavy in many of our minds, we are seeing a lot of exploration into found or recycled or upcycled items. Sarah Machtey offered up this steam punk pouch necklace with removable magnifying glass for the mixed media category of the awards with a bit of all of that. The front and back of this small pouch is from a soda can turned inside out – you can still see the printing of the soda can on the inside – but she embossed the can with decorative lines and used mica powder infused liquid polymer in the recesses to make them stand out. The band across the top is upcycled copper from a renovation project while the side leaves and earrings are polymer clay. Not sure if the magnifying glass was bought or found but it certainly could have been reused from something else.
The pouch is 7” (18 cm) in height from the top edge to the bottom of the magnifying glass, so it’s no small bit of tin on there. Of course, she could have used polymer to create the metal sections but it would’ve been a bulkier piece. The tin keeps the weight down as well as adding some structural strength that would only have been accomplished with a much thicker wall of polymer.
Keep in mind, when we are talking mixed-media it doesn’t necessarily have to be another art material. For instance, I combined poetry with photos of polymer in a challenge last year that I was posting on my personal Instagram page. Other people mix it up by installing the work in unusual places so that the what is placed on becomes part of the artwork such as fairy doors installed on walls or in tree trunks or tiles installed into a kitchen backsplash. Rachel Gourley takes it just a touch further, installing her little collections so that they recede into the landscape. She scatters her polymer elements out and about in natural settings, looking much like organic growths but unexpected in their color, shape, and placement.
Putting Together Your Own Mixer
This week, I didn’t pull any tutorials for you to try because it would have to be a mad, a long list of other materials to give you any real idea of your options. Instead, I might suggest that you keep your eye open for what other polymer artists are doing with other materials. Perhaps one of the above ideas piqued your interest already. If so, research that other material and find ways to acquire or hone your skill in that medium. Just put “polymer clay and [fill in the blank with the material you’re curious about]” into the search bar on Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, or Google images and see what pops up. Add the word “tutorial” to see what offerings there are online. I’m sure there will be plenty of inspiration.
You can also grab your Spring 2015 – Diversity issue of The Polymer Arts or the Convergence themed issue from Spring of 2016, both of which have a ton of ideas around using other materials with polymer. You can see the table of contents for all back issues of The Polymer Arts on this page to check out what these issues have to offer. Then, if you don’t have the issues, you can order them on the website.
In fact, let’s have a sale!
Why don’t you grab a few back issues and take a full 33% off 3 or more! Good on digital or print, I’ll keep this up until next Sunday so grab them this week. Use promo code TPA33 at checkout.
And … I’m Off!
I would normally have some community news and deals for you to look into at this point, but I did not get to that. This week has been a struggle. I am being kept busy by a house that has decided to just fall apart all of a sudden. My creative energies have been used up relocating kitchen activities to the garage, the porch, and even my studio because of plumbing issues while getting tons of exercise running large circles around the house because the garage door won’t open, washing my clothes in the bathroom sink because the laundry machine won’t drain, and constantly shuffling ice packs from freezer to fridge because the fridge is on and off and its replacement is weeks away from getting here. All this happening two weeks before we start some (apparently!) much-needed kitchen remodeling. I’m not making this up. But talk about mixing it up!
So, I’m going to get back to my at-home glamping while trying to get the next issue wrapped up for you. But tune in next week for more polymer pretties and inspiration, and, hopefully, less house drama from Sage’s corner! In the meantime, if you work with another medium, please share it below. Or tell us the most unusual medium you’ve combined with polymer! I’d love to get a feel for what you all are working on besides polymer. Leave links to the work as well if available! (If you get this by email, click on the post title to get to the post page and scroll down to comments.) I’m excited to see what you all have to share!
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What is it about weathered and worn surfaces that so many people find attractive these days? Mind you, I am very much one of them. I have a whole line of work called “Beautiful Decay” that explores the beauty I find in the deterioration of durable materials. But the one related effect that seems to be everywhere these days is crackling. Who doesn’t love a good crackle! From shabby chic furniture to crazed ceramics to crackle glass decor, the look of a deteriorating surface seems to have wide-ranging appeal.
Knowing that, it’s not really a surprise that crackle is so popular as a polymer technique. A great many of us are already texture fiends and, if you love texture then you are going to try crackle- so there’s one of the reasons for its popularity in polymer. But we also know that there is a market for work with crackled surfaces since it pops up in so many areas related to decoration and adornment, making it a safe bet if you sell your work.
There is no one right or best way to create a crackled surface in polymer. You may not have realized it, but there are literally dozens of ways to create crackle. It can be created with a crackle paint medium, partially cured layers of polymer (like I show you in my Controlled Crackle technique which you can find in your Fall 2011 edition of The Polymer Arts), dried paint (or glaze or gilders’ paste or floor wax) on raw clay, metal leaf on raw clay, leaching, alcohol treatments, or by creating a faux texture with impressed materials. And I know I am still missing a few in that list!
So, let’s enjoy some crackle work today and wrap up with a few tutorials on different crackle techniques that you can try out.
Let’s Get Cracking
One of my personal favorite “cracklers” is Staci Louise Smith. She uses a number of different techniques to achieve a wide range of cracked texture. In the necklace below, her crackle is not subtle. It is not evenly spread across her beads either but rather, it is rough and tumble and scattered in energetic horizontal lines. Her soft coloring calms the chaos of the crackle which is also balanced out by the many other purposeful accents and lines from the wire.
Staci can also do subtle as evidenced by the opening piece, a Balance Bowl from her tutorial in the Polymer Art Projects – Organic book. (You can get the book on our website if you want to make one of these stunning bowls.)
Check out this blog post where she shares how she makes the necklace here along with sketches and her thoughts on the process.
A subtle crackle can often take a bit more patience but what a lovely effect it can have. It may not even be obvious at first that the beads on this necklace below by Ursa Polak have a crackle surface, but the weathered feel comes across immediately. Take a close look to see all the fine-lined cracks that add to the depth and variation of the surface.
Kroma Crackle is a lovely gel medium that itself dries and cracks without having to stretch the clay and yet remains flexible so that you can manipulate the clay without the cracked material popping off. Once you worked with it for a bit you can control the size of the crackle pretty well. You can add small amounts of acrylic paint or mica powders to give yourself a wide variety of color options. You can also apply paints, inks, dyes and other colorants on it after its dry.
These earrings are by Els van Haasen uses Kroma Crackle on polymer. You can see how regular a crackle you can get with this medium. But it can definitely be quite varied once you come to understand how to use it.
You almost forget that the technique that was most commonly used by the highly esteemed Elise Winters, who we lost just this year, was also a crackle technique. Her work was very controlled, as was crackle but that was probably the most recognizable part about her signature style. I can only imagine the work she put into gaining such control over her crackle, but it just shows what can be done when we invest a bit of patience into our work. (I erroneously put in that this was metal leaf when I first posted but, no, it’s paint, which also takes such skilled control, having to ensure that the paint is evenly applied to get such fine crackle.)
This is actually a piece of mine from some years back. It includes alcohol treated raw clay, controlled cracking of partially cured clay, and metal leaf colored with alcohol ink. The alcohol treatment is a way of drying out the surface of raw clay to get a very fine crazing. It’s a bit of a tricky technique but it sure worked here. That helped create the uneven surface of the partially cured polymer under the metal leaf, giving it a burning ember look.
Let’s Crack You Up
Ready to try some various cracking techniques? Here are a few freebies to get you going:
If you want to try the straightforward Paint Crackle Techniques:
- Grab a craft acrylic (the cheap acrylics work better than artist tube acrylics which tend to stretch rather than crack) or tempera paint and a well-conditioned sheet of polymer rolled on the thickest setting of your pasta machine.
- Brush a moderate (not heavy) layer of the paint onto the polymer. Wait for it to completely dry.
- Then roll it through the pasta machine set at two settings down from the thickness you created the sheet on. You can stop here or, for wider, more varied crackle, turn the sheet 90°, adjust the pasta machine down another one or two settings and run it through again.
- You should have a nice crackle now but if your paint is stretching rather than cracking, rolling another sheet of polymer and lay the crackle sheet on top and then start rolling it through the pasta machine again. Eventually, the paint will crack but sometimes you need a really thick layer of polymer to start in order to stretch it far enough. Tempera paint won’t stretch and cracks very nicely if you have that on hand or fancy a run to your local craft store. You could also get some crackle medium while you’re out and follow the instructions to crackle paint directly on your raw polymer clay.
You can find some examples of the use of different paints on this post by Jan Geisen.
For more tutorials online:
- One of the things I didn’t show you in the samples above was how to use impression material to create a faux crackle effect. I use crumpled aluminum foil for this and then use the antiquing approach of rubbing acrylic paint into the cracks after its cured and wiping it off. But Katie Oskin has an interesting material to share in this online tutorial, as well as showing the effect of painting it before she impresses it.
- In this video tutorial, Sandy Huntress shows you how to crackle very thin sheets of partially cured polymer clay.
- Crackling can be done on round surfaces too! Here’s an online tutorial using metal leaf on bicone beads to create crackle. Keep in mind you could do the same thing by painting the beads and then rolling them around to get it crack.
Do you know of other great crackle tutorials or want to point out another crackling technique I didn’t mention? Drop a comment below (if you’re on this post’s page online) or click on the title of this post to go to the post’s page and share the info with us all. It would be much appreciated!
Bits of News
- The IPCA announced the winners of the IPCA awards on Wednesday. Here is a video presentation of it. Or you can find the list here.
- Registration is now open for Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes new online course, Matrix Canes.
- What are you doing with your tax refund this year? How about getting that NeverKnead machine you’ve been wanting for forever? Get 10% off your new machine now on the website. Use promo code 10PERCENT.
Okay… Off with me. Working on the next issue of The Polymer Studio. Get your subscription or catch up if you didn’t get the first issue by just jumping over to the website now.
Know that your purchases and subscriptions help me pay the bills so I can justify the time I put into sharing all the good stuff on this blog. Help me help you as we collectively feed our addiction to polymer!
Have a wonderful and creative week! –Sage
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I was traveling this past week, otherwise I would have posted earlier about the passing of our iconic Elise Winters. I’m sure you have heard the news through other avenues that her battle with cancer ended on New Year’s day but I wanted to post a farewell here.
Although I did not know her well, we did talk and in our few conversations, I found we had some differing views but the details mattered little as we were on the same team, wanting to promote and raise the view of polymer to the level of a fine art wherever we could. My efforts have been tiny ripples to her tremendous waves, however. Elise is the reason we have polymer art in so many museums and, especially, holding its own at the esteemed Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin where polymer is one of the six categories of craft that the museum has placed its focus on. We have so much to thank her for.
Elise’s work is readily recognizable and has never been well replicated. Her combination of Skinner blends and crazed acrylic stripes were coaxed into some of the most unusual and unexpected shapes and forms. Although her ruffled and pillow forms were some of her most widely known pieces, I have always thought the piece you see here was one of her best. It’s a brooch from 2006 called Skinner Inner Brooch. This has a much more direct and grounded energy than her well-known ruffles and its inner reveal of a bull’s-eye cane gives it another dimension, bringing us to consider what is underneath, beyond the beautiful surface.
Movement and energy of this kind were paramount in her artwork and, as we have seen, also in her passion and drive to make polymer a recognized fine art material. I hope there are enough of us to amass a similarly zealous energy to continue the work for which she paved such an integral path for our craft. Thank you, Elise.
For a look back at this legendary artist, jewelry designer, and polymer art advocate you can visit her website here.
From Winter into Spring …
I would also like to put out a reminder that the first issue of The Polymer Studio is set to go to print at the end of this week. If you would like to get the first print copies straight from the printer, be sure to purchase your subscription or single issue pre-order by this Wednesday, January 9th, to get on the direct mail list we give to the printer. The issue will be released on January 19th in digital.
You can look forward to …
Tutorials
- Kitchen Sink Imprint Mokume by Julie Picarello
- Magical Phoenix Feather by Christi Friesen
- Martian Footprints Necklace by Anna Malnaya
- Swoop Pendant by Beatrice Picq
- More is More Fimo Bracelet by Jeannette Froese LeBlanc
- Mosaic Stained Glass Canes by Linda Leach
- Shimmering Scenery Pendant by Sage Bray
Tips
- Mix a Near and Far Color Palette with Tracy Holmes
- Mix it Up with Embossing Powders with Debbie Crothers
- Creative Studio Organization Ideas by our Staff
Inspiration
- Studio Tour: Small Spaces in Germany with Anke Humpert
- In-Depth Artist Profile: Julie Picarello
- Uncommon Clay Artist Profile: Travis Suda
… and much more!
Get your subscription here at www.ThePolymerStudio.com or www.TenthMuseArts.com.
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