Outside Inspiration: Glitter, Resin and Wireworks
December 13, 2013 Inspirational Art
Is there any material better for showing off the shimmer and shine of any surface effect than crystal clear resin? It allows for light to fall on metal foils, glitter, mica powders and and any other shiny material locked under it’s clear layers. A tasteful addition of well worked wire and crystal accents keep the glittery resin of these dainty wing earrings created by Christina Allen Page from going overboard.
If you haven’t worked with resin yet, it’s a fantastic finishing product although it takes a little practice to work out bubble-free applications and to avoid the potential mess it can create. ALWAYS wear gloves when using resin and preferably on a dedicated work surface. For one, it is a super powerful adhesive. And secondly, you can become suddenly and severely allergic to the chemical if you allow regular contact with your skin. I know this to be true because I am one of those this happened to. It is no fun, not to mention pretty darn scary and now, to work with resin, I have to don the equivalent of a haz mat suit. Quite a drag. The chemical BPA is in high concentrations in all resins before it cures–it’s what allows the hardening of the liquid. So be good to yourself and take precaution so you can continue to use it for many, many years because it is great stuff.
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Shimmer From a Past Culture
December 10, 2013 Inspirational Art
Turkey’s Nihal Erpeden brings us some seasonal shine with her Ottoman series of necklaces. Although when Ottoman is mentioned, I usually think of something to put my feet up on, there is a whole rich history and culture that came out of the Ottoman Empire that we see the influence of but may not commonly associate with the Turkish conquerors or their long standing rule–from 1299-1923, well into the 20th century. That’s not so very long ago!
The interesting thing for art that comes out of the expanded rule of a single culture is the integration of other cultures into the aesthetics of the conquering society and vice versa, of course. Decorative arts from the Ottoman Empire bear the flourish and filigree common in the Turkish culture’s history but also integrated motifs from Persian, Greek, and Byzantine art over the years they ruled in those areas. That makes for a very rich and diverse source of imagery, color and design to draw inspiration from as Nihal has done here.
Both past and present cultures, espeically those we aren’t very familiar with can be a tremendous source of ideas and imagery to integrate into your own artwork. Dayle Doroshow wrote a wonderful article in the present Winter 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts on the influences of past culture with ideas on how to draw from them to give new direction and complexity to your work.
As you know, if you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, I strongly encourage all artists to look outside their discipline for inspiration as it will keep your work and the community’s work fresh and ever expanding. The same goes for looking outside your own culture. When you’re feeling uninspired or think our work is getting stagnant, look outside of what you know, of what you are familiar with. Find something new that gets you excited. Our brains crave novel experiences and information. Feed your brain and you’ll feed your creativity.
For more of Nihal’s lovely work, take a look at her Etsy shop and blog site.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
Inspiration Infusion for Caning
January 19, 2013 Inspirational Art, Technique tutorials
Looking for a new challenge in caning? Well, here are a couple ideas.
One, try some new cane patterns. I was mesmerized by the complexity of this monochromatic cane created by Israel’s Marcia Tzigelnik. You can get the tutorials for these and other beautiful canes in her Etsy shop.
Second, do something new with your cane slices. Here is what Kristie Foss created with Marcia’s canes.
Don’t you admire the way she uses the lines in the canes to give definitive direction and sense of movement to the forms? Just lovely.
Feeling inspired? What can you do differently to get your mojo going this weekend?
Outside Inspiration: Fiery Soutache
January 18, 2013 Inspirational Art
I’ve brought up soutache before. It’s easily translatable to polymer … all you need is an extruder and a steady hand. I thought an occasional return to ponder it’s possibilities wouldn’t hurt. Especially when you have such colors and form, as can be found in the work of talented soutache artist Alina of Antidotum.
Fiery! Just what we need in the midst of a chilly winter.
You can see more beautiful color combinations and forms on Alina’s Etsy page here.
The Genuis of Wee Houses
November 10, 2012 Inspirational Art
I started my list of gifts I need to make for family and friends this holiday season. The kiddies and non-jewelry wearing adults are a little more tricky for me. So perusing for ideas this morning, I found these wonderful little houses by Etsy’s OneElf.
The genius of making these kinds of items (aside from how adorably attractive they are) is that whether it’s for gift giving or selling, you can create a series that people will want to collect. Making a variety of buildings and other scene specific pieces can bring customers back again and again to add to the little village or scene on their shelf. And family and friends will have something to add to each year.
They might not be houses either. They could be animals in a zoo, dishes, food, etc. Anything that would be increased in value in the owner’s eye by adding new related items. And they’d be fun for the creator too!
Starting to think Holiday
October 2, 2012 Polymer community news, Tips and Tricks
If you sell on Etsy (or have been considering it), you might want to take a look at this intensive and free set of weekly tips and goal-setting assistance that can really get your holiday sales a big boost. It’s their annual 10 week Holiday Boot Camp. They’ll cover inventory needs, optimizing for searches, photos and pricing, getting repeat business, holiday promotions and getting those important last minute sales.
And this is all free! You can check in on the Boot Camp page each week to read up on the subject of the week or you can sign up for the newsletter, so it’s in your email inbox each week. You might also want to sign up for the Etsy Success Team where you can get a buddy, cheer each other on, and get additional words of wisdom.
So … what kind of art work will you be focused on this coming holiday? I’m really into rings right now but I also hope to make more ornaments similar to this one I made last year.
Time to pull out that sketchbook and start designing!
Outside Inspiration: Subtraction in Metals
September 21, 2012 Inspirational Art
So, I guess I’m not pulling away from the leaves and Autumn theme much this week. I just love the season.
In this piece, it is more about the forest than the leaves. The layering of the landscape, the way the trees are cut from one layer into the next and the variation of texture make it a delightful pendant.
Although layering is regularly used with polymer, cutting away the clay in this way is not. The absence of material — a space left in the form — adds another dimension beyond the form of the work itself. We also tend to have a curiosity about what is missing, so we are apt to focus on it. This negative space technique gives you yet another way to direct the viewer’s attention within your work.
This piece was created by Beth Millner who has an Etsy shop full of forest-inspired metal work .
The Flowery Depths
August 28, 2012 Inspirational Art
Zuda Gay Pease is a grandmother who lives in Illinois and creates these incredible flowers that seem to have so much depth and complexity to them. But if you look closely, they aren’t so much complex as unexpected.
The caned petals aren’t simply sliced but also cut and sculpted. This gives them a depth and tactile surface I don’t think you’d find anywhere in nature but they seem to be perfectly natural regardless.
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So … did any of you come up with your own idea for air plant vessels? Did you think about turning them upside down? I know I didn’t but I have to agree that once you do that, they are going to look like live creatures. Perhaps that is how one crafty lady came up with the creative creatures you see here.
On her Etsy site, Jellyfish Kisses, Lish Jellyfish (I’m thinking that is not her real name … just a guess) integrates air plants with sculpted vessels off all kinds of creatures. Some are so well-integrated, you might now know it’s a plant tucked in there, at least not right away. It’s just fun stuff and I thought these images might push you aspiring air plant vessel makers to thinking beyond upright containers and into other realms. I mean, that is the advantage of air plants … they can be situated in any direction, as long as they have a spot to tuck their toes in and hold on.
For more creative ideas for vessels, just plug-in “air plant” and other key words like “vessel”, “clay”, or “holder” into Pinterest, Google Images, Instagram or other favorite visual site and just immerse yourself in all the possibilities!
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Read MoreThis week, we’ve looked at work that showed a couple of artists pushing themselves in form and repetition. The use of repetition can have an exciting and energized look or it can be calm and grounding. But for the artist creating it, it is often a doorway to the sometimes elusive state of what is often referred to as flow. It’s that time when you are so enthralled and engrossed by what you are doing that you completely lose track of time, of where you are, and sometimes what exactly you are doing. It’s a fantastic state to reach because it means that the work you are doing is satisfying your many sides. This kind of work is challenging enough to keep your attention, interesting enough to basically mesmerize you, but is not frustrating or tedious so you can relax and enjoy the process.
This little bit of insanity you see here is just such a process for Elspeth McLean, an Australian living in Canada and a self-proclaimed “Dotillism” artist. According to an article published on the Mother Nature Network, creating art is her form of meditation and these mandala stones are at the heart of that process for her. The joy and dedication she gets from her work is so readily apparent that the poor girl is overrun with requests for these beautiful stones.
Images of these stones went viral recently, and now Elspeth has been forced to do something rather different from most Etsy sellers–she releases the sale of her stones only on certain days and during certain hours, just a couple of times a month, with many selling instantly and all selling out, it appears, within the day. What a problem to have! The colorful and zen-like beauty of the stones can also be found in her dotillism paintings. However, there is something to the centered patterns of the mandala stones that really draws your eye and pulls at something deeply rooted in all of us. And for those of you that cane, does this not spark some ideas?
To see the short article and all the wonderful photos of her stones, go to this page on MNN.com. You can admire her illustrations and photographs of her work artfully placed in nature on her website and, of course, in her Etsy shop.
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/blogs/dotted-mandala-stones-reveal-artist-vibrant-life
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We have another scene picked by Ginger Davis Allman today, this one by miniature sculptor Angee Chase. This is actually an older piece but it was kind of hard to pass by for someone with a love of painting and light like myself.
If you’ve ever taken a painting class you probably heard a lot about capturing the quality of light? Light is what visually defines everything we see but it has variable qualities, especially sunlight throughout the day. I found dawn and dusk to be two of the hardest but most interesting types of light to capture as you are working with growing or diminishing light coming from a low angle. The deepening shadows and richness of a darkening scene at sunset are well captured in Angee’s Sunset Farm Painting. This includes determining the right shades of color, choosing the right value for the background behind the foreground objects and varying the value of the layers of scenery. I’m not sure if the orb in the sky was intended as a sun or a moon but the lighting on the mountains are perfectly portrayed as a full moon rising on the tail end of sunset. And that is quite an inspiring scene if you’ve ever been able to see that over wide open country. This piece is only 3 .75″ x 4.25″ (95mm x 107mm) by the way. Great detail for something so small.
Angee is still doing scenes these days but the ones I found on her Etsy shop are 1″ (25mm) square. Now we’re talking tiny! Her newer shop is called WonderWorks and has a presence on Facebook as well. Her Flickr photostream displays her older pieces if you want ideas that are more like what you see here.
Ginger Davis Allman lives in Springfield, Missouri with her husband Gary, her three kids and her many craft obsessions. Subscribe to her blog and look around her website for her well-researched and in-depth posts and articles on polymer related subjects. Support her great information and research as well as treating yourself by getting yourself a tutorial or two from this talented lady.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
Read MoreDuring our search for random design last week, we came across a lot of very colorful pieces, many using the entire rainbow and getting away with it beautifully. It’s not that easy to make a piece with every hue in it. That wide variation in color calls for cohesion in other elements, be they characteristics of color itself, or in the form and other elements of design.
In Margit Bohmer’s necklace here, she comes very close to chaos with so much color, a large variety of shapes and many different motifs. So does it work? I’d say. Quite delightfully.
The answer is in the color of course. Margit uses fairly saturated colors but they are all shaded or tinted a bit which subdues their impact. Many are also semi-transparent which further tones down the potential brilliance. It’s this slight but consistent understatement that allows these hues to harmoniously co-exist in one piece.
Looking at Margit’s work on her Flickr pages and in her Etsy shop, you’ll find one bold artist unafraid of lots and lots of color!
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
Read MoreI know it’s still the middle of winter but there are definitely a lot of thoughts of Spring being bandied about. I caught sight of these little flowers by Etsy’s MyCraftGarden in Bangkok and thought they would be a delightful way to start the week. Who doesn’t like flowers on a Monday?
These 2″x 4″ (5 x10 cm) flower baskets wouldn’t take up a lot of desk space but what a nice way to brighten up a work area. For more day brightening flowers, miniature blooming bonsai, and colorful baskets of mini fruits and vegetables take a look at MyCraftGarden’s Etsy’s shop.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
Read MoreIn our recent perusal of items that people are posting, commenting and otherwise bandying about online, we’ve noticed there is quite a bit of tribal influenced designs and color palettes. So this week, we thought we’d look at tribal tendencies and see how our fellow clayers are using this type source for inspiration in their work.
Liz Hall has previously put out a lot of work reminiscent of the American Southwest. (She’s from Maryland and lives in Virginia so I’m not sure how that happened.) I never really thought about it, but the southwest imagery and patterns are not so different from what we generally think of as tribal. Ancient art, whether from Africa, Australia, Europe or the Americas, tends towards natural and raw edged work, heavy with patterning in motifs particular to their area and culture. So it would not be difficult to move from the Southwestern aesthetic which draws from the Native American Indian culture to colors and patterns closer to an African influence as Liz has done here in these bangles.
These bangles are one of the final entries for the polymer clay category of the Niche awards. You can see the other entries on the Niche website. Take a look at more of Liz’s work on her own website and Etsy store.
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Read MoreThe New Year is just about here. Many of us are thinking about what we will be doing in 2014 including new projects, new shows and maybe even a new direction in our craft work. This week I’ll throw out a few ideas about how to push your work while we enjoy some pretty polymer pieces.
Many of us cover objects with clay. Often it involves canes or sheets of clay, but what if you used the object more like a canvas and added many small elements to create intricate patterns an texture. I think this can really bring that kind of work up a notch or two. Just look at these wedding toast glasses by Inara Kirhenstein from Riga, Latvia.
Inara’s description of her glasses: “Luxury wedding flutes decorated with more than 50 polymer clay flowers, Swarovski rhinestones, seed beads and faux pearls. Small Czech Preciosa seed beads are appliqued one by one.” This kind of application would certainly take a bit of patience but the detailed work certainly pays off. It’s very eye-catching and impressive.
All of Inara’s work is similarly detailed. She does jewelry as well as these kinds of glasses. You can see more of her beautiful work in her Etsy shop.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
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