Way Beyond Translucent Canes
It’s been a while since I shared something you could actually sit in the studio and try so although this isn’t exactly within the theme of the week, it’s related enough and could be a really cool and fun thing to try this weekend if you are looking for something new and have a bit of translucent clay on hand.
They are related to translucent canes because they are translucent and the technique came from pushing caning. As the artist Agnes Dettai says on the Flickr post for this technique, “I have to thank Christine Dumont again; the idea for these came from the work on reinventing caning that we did for the course ‘Becoming a better artist.'”
It’s great to see how pushing yourself in a completely different direction, way beyond what you think something is or should be, can result in something so radically different. The shells are little gems all by themselves but there is much more than can be done with this. She uses Play-Doh to create a temporary base to wrap the translucent clay around but as she notes, the clay leaves a bit of stain from the color of the Play-Doh. Although this may not have been intended initially, it gives a lovely, vibrant and still very translucent color to the polymer. A great incidental discovery within a successful exploration.
You can see what else Agnes does with her playdoh hollows and what exploration she has done with this idea on her Flickr photostream and can find detailed notes on the technique on this blog post of hers. Get the complete steps for these shells by clicking the photo to get to the Flickr photo they are on and then go the next image left for the finishing steps.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Try out Agnes’ technique with translucent clay or just try using water-soluble clay (Play-Doh) as a form for hollow or open forms. Where can you take this idea?
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