Enticing and Entertaining
August 23, 2017
Inspirational Art, Polymer community news
The art jewelry at these events is also a big draw. There is nothing quite like seeing masterful polymer work in person.
Here is a gorgeous piece by Bonnie Bishoff. She wore it to the final gala event and I just could not stop looking at the delicate forms and sunset-like colors. The picture (and the poor lighting in these places) doesn’t quite do it justice.
Another bonus to coming to these events is the local color. In this case, Sherman Oberson, a board member of the IPCA and a local Pennsylvania resident, treated a small handful of us to a tour of his insanely packed and ever-entertaining collection of flea market and thrift store finds. We did this, in part, to honor Nan Roche whose birthday it was. A huge collector of the curious and visually enticing herself, it was a perfect birthday outing for her and an immensely entertaining evening for those of us who got to tag along.
Poke around on Instagram and Facebook for more on Sherman’s place and other Synergy events.
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A Choir of Angels
June 22, 2017
Inspirational Art
Exploring technique and design doesn’t ever end, or at least I don’t think it should. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been working with a material, there is always more to learn. Barbara McGuire is a true and long standing polymer pioneer who may often return to signature techniques but she keeps expanding on what she has done, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in big leaps.
This collection of beads is one of her subtler explorations. Barbara has been making face canes for ages but she keeps changing up what she does with them. The angelic looking collection here gets its ethereal feel from the use of translucent wings and background cane slices. Past variations were commonly surrounded by opaque slices and balanced or radial backgrounds. The more freeform application here adds to the otherworldly feel of these little angels.
Barbara posts most of her recent work on her Facebook page while her products and news can usually be found on her website.
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Body of Work
June 20, 2017
Inspirational Art
Looking over a collection of work can tell you quite a bit about an artist and what intrigues them. The posts this week will give us a chance to consider, in a more complete and varied way, what an artist might be doing or be after in particular types of work.
Carole Monahan-Kampfe recently posted some rather intriguing pieces in what she refers to as her Steampunk collection but instead of jewelry, it looks like we are seeing a lot of ornaments. We are looking at Swellegant treatments (click the ad link below for more on this fascinating stuff) which make for some very yummy textures but the various shapes and variation on an ornament is what is most captivating about this work.
Although she is calling it steampunk and the influence of that aesthetic is there, many of the common motifs are, gratefully, missing and we can enjoy the exploration of the surface treatment and the manipulation of the ornament forms. I love the negative space in the ones with the floating centers and then those forms that are folding in on themselves which she calls Infinity Orbs. No standard ornament forms here either. Carole actually looks to be taking not the motifs and objects from the Steampunk arena but rather the inventive nature it is supposed to be representative of. Regardless, the choice of shapes and decorative touches are beautiful and more so in a collection like this where the various take on the elements and forms can be compared and contrasted.
The orbs at least, she lists as being made with Makin’s clay which is an air dry clay, rather than polymer but this could all be done with polymer as well of course. Carole just likes to try all kinds of things out as you can see on her Flickr photostream–another method of looking at an artist’s collection of work and over time at that. In this collection though, she seems to have really hit her stride and I hope she keeps playing with these ideas.
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Working on the Inside
June 17, 2017
Inspirational Art
Another way to push the disk element in strung jewelry design is to create designs on those inside surfaces. This might push you to design the disks in such a way as to open up space between them so that the work on the inside could be seen. That might present a bit of a challenge but it will likely present some interesting options for added accents and forms.
Margit Bohmer did just that. Her solution to show off the intricate and highly colorful faces of her disks was to slightly dome them and have them stacked in pairs with the concave sides in, allowing an angled view to all the beautiful color and textures she worked into them. It looks like quite a bit of work too. I just love seeing this kind of dedication and commitment to a piece. Each bead face is different and could stand on its own but all together, they create an engrossing piece that will probably take the owner years to become familiar with all its varied surfaces.
A riot of color and texture is a signature of Margit’s and she never leaves us wanting for more of either. See her latest work on her Flickr photostream.
Weekly Inspiration Challenge: Choose a basic or commonly used design and push it. By sketching, planning, or just playing with your materials, change the form or the way this basic design is constructed as far as you can until you come up with something that intrigues and excites you then create your own original work from the ideas you came up with.
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The Disk Cubed
June 15, 2017
Inspirational Art
Let’s move on from the ‘ordinary’ disk necklace and really push what these could be. First of all, who says they need to be round? Or strung on their center sitting neatly one on top of the other? Well, no one, that’s who.
Silvia Ortiz de la Torre goes completely off the disk reservation by squaring off the standard disk necklace element and taking full control of their positioning. This necklace is getting so far from a disk that I bet some of you are thinking it’s not a disk necklace at all. And maybe not but the stacking and repetition of form is the same and this is a good example of where an idea might start with some common or basic design and really veer off in very exciting directions, ending in a place barely recognizable from where it started. I don’t know that Silvia started with the idea of disks but she could have. And so can you start from a well used (or over-used) form or basic design and end up somewhere quite different. The thing is, it would have been hard to get to that cool and very original design without that common or basic starting point.
This piece is several years old but Silvia still loves disks and stacking but she is taking things in a very different direction these days. See how she has journeyed from pieces like this to her big intricate disks display in her Flickr photostream and her Etsy shop.
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Disk Arrangements
June 13, 2017
Inspirational Art
Disc beads are fantastic for the complexity they can create just by sheer numbers. They also pull the design away from any one bead and put the focus on how they work together. Employing Skinner blends to create the series of well-arranged colors on this necklace, Spain’s Carmen Morente del Monte, develops a rather striking look with the common stacked disk necklace design as the basis for her composition.
It is not that we haven’t seen quite a few Skinner disc arrangements but this one is rather intriguing with its wide array of colors that still somehow conveys a sense of quiet coherence. I believe that is primarily due to the muted, natural tone of the colors. Their thick spacers subtly echo the surrounding color while their variations trail off to long stacks of warm grays. I think the choice of gray rather than black or white or simply more of the colorful blends for the back half of the bead string is actually what makes this piece work so well. The gray creates a kind of neutral background for the colors to contrast with but the contrast is a gentle one which is also echoed at points in the front beads where the blends go to gray.
I was just having a conversation this weekend about how people steer away from anything well used believing their work won’t be appreciated unless it’s wholly original but how far from the truth that is. Doing something really, really well, even when it has elements seen many times before, is a far bigger and more difficult accomplishment than striving for something purely original. I think this necklace is just such an example.
You can find more of Carmen’s well thought out pieces in her Etsy shop and her Pinterest boards.
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The Many Faces of Glass Beads
June 10, 2017
Inspirational Art
To round out this week’s quick focus on beads, I thought I’d share focal beads in another medium that is very well-known for them–glass.
Glass artists have some very particular and, literally, inflexible limitations and yet they create these extremely intricate and amazing beads. They do get to work with super clear transparency–a characteristic of their medium that they use to great advantage–which is something that is difficult to achieve in polymer, but their forms and patterns are something that, I think, could be a gold mine of inspiration and a jumping off point for ideas in polymer that go beyond the basic and common beads seen in polymer.
Here are just four examples of the intricacy and beauty in glass bead making today. Starting from top left is a bead created by Leah Nietz, top right is Lisa Fletcher, bottom left is Andrea Guarino, and bottom right is Ikuyo Yamanaka. You can click on each artist’s name to reach their shop or website to look further into what they create. You can also immerse yourself in glass focal beads by putting that very phrase into a Pinterest, Google Images, Etsy, Flickr, or even Instagram.
Weekly Inspiration Challenge: Choose your favorite image posting service, such as those just listed above, and enjoy the art and inspiration that comes up when you search for “focal beads”. Choose a couple of images and try to determine what you like best about the bead or beads and then figure out how to recreate those characteristics in polymer. Hopefully that leads you to some original and very fulfilling polymer bead explorations.
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A Bead Cubed
June 8, 2017
Inspirational Art
How about just a little bead beauty from the consistently wonderful Sarah Shriver today while I amble down the road?
Six canes constructed into a cube that is both turned on its side and has had its corner’s tweaked makes for a beautiful simple bead design. Just those two changes to the upright and steady cube has created movement due to its relative instability, facing the world with but one point down, and direction since the slight sweep of the sides slides our eye out to the point of the cube corners and beyond. And let’s not forget the lovely lines of the canes themselves that add to both the movement and directing of the viewers eyes beyond the constrains of the cube.
Apparently, Sarah will be teaching this Celtic cane on the Alaska Polymer Clay Cruise, the “Clayditarod” coming up next month. I was not able to discern if spaces are left for what is certain to be an amazing polymer adventure but you can check out the details and query as needed on the cruise website here. And for more splendid Sarah Shriver work, jump over to her website here.
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Bead Break
June 6, 2017
Inspirational Art
This will be a simple, and hopefully simply delightful, week as I am traveling or in the midst of preparing to travel and will have to be brief. But I have had the idea of the ‘bead’ on my mind. That sounds pretty basic, I know, but for art jewelry, the bead–be it a simple, plain spacer or an extravagant focal piece–is the most common single element created and thus, has a pretty highly esteemed place in the world of adornment. So let’s take a closer look at some very well-considered and lovingly created beads.
These beauties are cane constructed by the ever clever Ivy Niles of iKandi Clay. Canes takes their place on center stage as well as energetically running around the circumference for an intricate and rather mesmerizing look.
If you are partial to either a well-done cane or intricate, take a break to look through Ivy’s her Etsy shop and her website.
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I don’t think I have ever done a week on a specific color but that’s what we are going to do this week and purple is my choice. I don’t know if it is all the purple blooms coming out in this nice Spring weather we are having or just my penchant for it, but I’ve been seeing a lot of beautiful purple pieces popping up on Pinterest in particular. These aren’t all new pieces. It just seems that purple is on more than a few people’s minds.
It is not hard to combine other colors with purple and arrive at a beautiful and majestic combination since purple will pretty much make any palette majestic if it takes center stage. Take this nicely balanced–both in colors and in the way the shapes are hung–necklace by Julie Picarello. The purple does dominate but take a close look at the other colors she has here. Yellow is not surprise since it is purple’s complement but there is also a touch of orange, mauve and magenta. They are subtle blends so none of those stand out but they allow contrast with the purple to allow the darker color a richer feel than it would have on its own.
Julie is, of course, a master at choosing colors for her signature mokume techniques. For inspiring color combinations, take a look at more of her work on her website and Flickr pages, and check out her book, Patterns in Polymer.
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We’ll wrap up the week with this curious creature that is somehow very beautiful, sympathetic, and magical all at the same time.
This is actually a felted figure with a polymer face, and real crystals embedded in its back, created by Genriette of the Secret Jar shop on LiveMaster. Ichchi, the Keeper of the Mountain Caves she calls it which really makes you stop and wonder about the story Genriette had in mind. Luckily, she gives us the story in her listing. Mind you, this is a Google translation so it’s a little odd at points. You have to do a little interpreting of your own but it sparks the imagination nonetheless. :
“The spirit that dwelleth in the snowy mountains. But do not think that he was as cold as the furry giants. It’s not like that at all. The spirit of quiet mountains, as if the wind whisper quiet as the evening for your window, and soft, like feathers. Ichchi afternoon sitting in his cozy cave and snowflakes cut out from the clouds, and the night creeps in the world and looking at the stars. Sometimes he is, as he himself would be a Star. I would have illuminated the way people and pointed the way to the north. Once Spirit became lonely mountains, and he came to our workshop. Looking for a friend. It promises to teach climbing to the most distant peaks.”
I really like that this artist works in a myriad of craft mediums including cold porcelain, resin, wood, wire, and wax along with felt and polymer as seen here. Obviously her medium does not define her work but rather, she uses whatever is fitting for what she wants to create. This does require building a lot of different skills but an artist with many skills is far less restricted in what they want to make.
Find more of Genriette’s interesting creatures and try to guess their materials before looking at the descriptions in her Livemaster shop or her vk.com pages.
Weekly Inspiration Challenge: Create a piece inspired by a creature of your choosing or create a creature from your own imagination. Even if you don’t usually do this kind of thing, creating a creature will provide you with a studio mascot and more company there if you don’t already have some!
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I think we’ll stick with inspiring creatures this week. And what creatures are more inspiring to us than those we share our life with? Dogs, cats, birds, fish …we find something in them that we connect with so it’s not surprising that they make their way into our art.
Recently Angela Garrod posted these kindred creatures of hers on Facebook. With a beautifully stylized approach, she captures the look, and even a few good expressions of some of people’s favorite animals, and this while playing with geometric designs. The hand scratched texture keeps the geometric shapes from feeling too stiff and sterile and adds quite a bit to what would otherwise be just simple shapes and lines through which we, somehow, recognize the variety of animals. I don’t know how our brains see that but more so, it is always a wonder how cartoonists and other artists create images with just a few simple lines and shapes and know we’ll see it. The brain is just pretty darn nifty.
Angela has been up to all kinds of cool and curious geometric designs of late. You can see her explorations through her shared photos on Flickr, her Facebook page, and the gallery on her website.
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Nothing like a “Rainbow Coalition” to start the week off and that is what we are fortunate enough to be enjoying today with this enchanting little gather by the ever whimsical Doreen Kassel. The colors of these characters are just so juicy and combined in a most delicious way. Marks were scratched into the surface after painting to energize the forms of this little gang’s broad torsos. Although their body shapes don’t leave room for much movement everything else is in motion from the dancing gestures of the arms to the expressive facial gestures. It is hard not to smile in their presence.
Speaking of which… I could use an energized rainbow coalition of my own as we have lost a couple of contributors for the next issue of The Polymer Arts and could use some imagination and talent to fill in the spaces. The next issue’s theme is ‘Color!’ Would you want to be a part of this delightful next issue? I could use help fleshing out a “ways to design colorful beaded necklaces” article or maybe you have a color-centric or just colorful technique tutorial such as painting with or on polymer.
We also really could use a short personal story, that may or may not have to do with color but would inspire and make people smile, for that last page, the Muse’s Corner section. Do you have any splendid ideas the readers of The Polymer Arts might want? You’ll never know unless you write us!
Please send your article ideas to me using the link on our submission page or write me directly at sbray(at)thepolymerarts.com. Avoid replying to this post if you get it by email as it won’t go to me, taking a day or two to get forwarded, and I would love to see your ideas as soon as possible!
In the meantime, for more color and smiles, take a look at what Doreen is up to on her website or follow her on Instagram.
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So let’s finish up this week on dots and spots with one piece which happens to have many, many ways of using the decorative and often dynamic element.
Shelley Atwood isn’t shy with her details as demonstrated here. Pin-pricks give way to tiny circles which play in the background behind spots of color and details of varying shapes, not just the roundness of the dots we know and love so well. But even the leaf shapes, repeated over and over, create the same kind of effect.
Having four sections doing basically the same thing helps with the suggestion that the leaf shapes should operate as spots rather than a distinctive visual. Even with all the variation, the dots, and spots and marks, all contained within a similarly sized space, balance each other out so you are left to just enjoy the riot of color and the joy of the spot.
Shelley’s work can be found, with all its many marks and delicious details, on her website and on Flickr.
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Oh, the dot. A dot is not really a shape and it doesn’t define anything for us in the way its closest relation, the singularly dimensional line, does. It is just a point in space or on a surface but it will always grab our attention. It marks a point that we feel drawn to investigate. However, when it’s gathered to create a texture or pattern, that draw it has doesn’t expand but acts more like beats in a song. So when you have lots of dots, make a song of it.
I think that is what Julia Zharova is doing here. It’s a song she likes too, so she’s created variations on it. In the top one she lets the dots be simple and smooth but backs them with a lot of organic texture. In the one below, the dots are concave and colored but the background texture is more subdued so that the dots can dance without distraction. It’s a couple of examples of variation on a similar design.
Julia seems rather fond of the dot, which is scattered throughout her beautifully composed and well finished work. Enjoy a break with Julia today with a perusal through her Livemaster shop.
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I’m going to use this to both wrap up my jabbering about the Spring issue of The Polymer Arts and as a segue into talking about a design element that seems rarely discussed … the dot. Or spot. Or point on a surface. Whatever you want to refer to it, dots or spots are an unassuming but strong design element. In polymer, we can give them dimension and form until they take on another life entirely. In Donna Greenberg‘s work, those organic gatherings of points definitely look to be alive.
We were so lucky to have another wonderful article by Donna in the latest issue, The Polymer Arts Spring 2017 – Shape and Form issue. She discusses ways to use your past work to inspire new work. I think most of us have tried going back to something we did before but her suggestions are a bit different and her examples are beautiful. She does a lot of these dot/spot barnacle-like cups in her re-formed work and in her latest vessels too.
Although the form of the ‘spots’ seen here are similar, the way they are used and gathered are not. Look at the one on top. It had an organic feel but the little cups and the spots are placed in a very orderly fashion. The rougher but lacy edge builds a balanced but dynamic tension, pulling away from the inner order. But the platter below is a purely random application with the gathered dots of different sizes flowing in a natural path through and around the piece. It’s less restricted nature also warranted the use of a brighter color, making the piece quite lively and cheerful.
I found these pieces on Donna’s Facebook page but also take a look at her barnacled beauties in the latest issue of The Polymer Arts or hop over to Donna’s website to see more of her dots and spots.
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I was so excited to have Carol Beal put together an article on lathe turned polymer. She demonstrates what you can do with a fairly inexpensive table top lathe to make intricate but easy polymer beads. But here is the thing that we didn’t have room for … you can make a lot more than beads on a small hobby lathe.
I searched around and found all these things being turned in polymer or a similar material like acrylic. Most would require the you cure and then turn the ‘blank’ as it is call without the functional parts attached so other than ensuring you can take the item apart to add the polymer, you have a pretty wide open field of functional and decorative art objects to explore with this technique:
- Pens (the top turned small item in pretty much any medium
- Bottle stoppers
- Ice cream and coffee scoops
- Every kind of eating utensil you can think of.
- Key chains
- Razor blade handles
- Crochet hooks
- Seam rippers
- Perfume applicators
- Makeup brushes
- Ornaments
- Hair sticks
- T-handle corkscrews
- Spinning tops
- Drawer handles and pulls
- Gauged Ear plugs
- Wands …
… basically any smallish thing with a long handle, long body, or is stout but round can potentially be created from or decorated with lathe turned polymer. I never thought about it but I sure am now.
What you see here are lathe turned acrylic pieces I found linked with Craft Supplies USA’s YouTube pages where they have a bunch of lathe videos for wood and acrylic blanks. However, you can see how easily this could be polymer. All you would need to do is follow Carol’s easy tutorial and once you are comfortable making beads, you could branch out into whatever you like. You would need the lathe of course which can be had for something in the range of $150-$600 dollars, depending on how precise and how serious you get. You can also find these kinds of tools on Craigslist and Ebay, sold by the well-intentioned hobbyist, on the cheap. I would go for new or like-new ones though so you know it is in good shape. These are not toys! That plus a set of woodturning tools which can be had for $30 brand new and you are set to go. I could see this being very addictive!
We could only post a small sample of what Carol has turned out (couldn’t resist the pun!) in lathe turned beads but take a peek at what she has on her Flickr site and in her Etsy shop as well as searching for lathe turned crafts or lathe polymer clay on Pinterest, Flickr, Etsy, and Google images to find even more ideas!
And if you still need to get your copy of the Spring issue, jump over to our website for Carol’s article and much more.
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One of my personal favorite articles in this issue is the interview of Wiwat Kamolpornjiwit. He has been one of my top jewelry designers since I saw his work some 9 years ago. I don’t think anyone does anything quite like what he does, not in polymer.
He really seems to approach his work from a purely construction and sculptural aspect, instead of getting into all the many ways polymer can be manipulated, putting the design first and the material second, if that. I love that. It should never matter what the material is if the design has not been well-considered. This is not to say that he doesn’t play with canes and surface design but they tend to be accents or focal points rather than the bulk of the work. This piece is actually a bit unusual for him, that I know of, as it incorporates a druzy stone moving the work into a bit more mixed media than in the past.
I believe this piece is from the collection shown at his recent American Craft Council show in Baltimore, Maryland. Cynthia also showed off his work on the Polymer Clay Daily blog a couple of weeks ago so he’s getting his share of attention right now, and for good reason. He has an interesting story so be sure to read that in the latest issue of The Polymer Arts magazine and see more of his work on his website and his Facebook page.
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