Breaking Traditions in Faux (And the Summer Issue is out!)
May 22, 2013
Inspirational Art
The really, truly amazing and incredible thing about working with polymer … you can make ANYTHING you want out of the stuff. (Well, I have yet to see properly emulated hair but close!) The thing is, we have this medium that has few limitations and endless possibilities but so often when faux stone or other faux natural materials are created from it, it is in the common natural colors and usually even in the same traditional forms we’ve seen them for centuries. Now I know some stones are expensive and making them in polymer just allows for an inexpensive option. And I am all for making faux ivory rather than getting real ivory from the source. Making faux that looks just like we’d expect the real material to look does make sense but what doesn’t make sense is why more people don’t move beyond what nature and tradition has made?
Let’s take jade for example. We think of it as green and Asian. So we see tons of faux polymer jade in variations of green in simple beads or Asian motifs. Understandable. But why be limited by what has been done?
Desiree McCrorey has never approached anything in a traditional manner as far as I can tell and that penchant has resulted in some really unusual and beautiful work. I mean, have you ever seen jade like in the necklace here?
I don’t know how difficult if would be to carve real jade into such forms but since its so easy with polymer, why not take advantage of that capability and go beyond what is usually done with the real material?
And why always green? I remember wondering that in the first year I worked with polymer. Nature already makes all these beautiful variations of soft greens in jade. But why not bright blues? Or purples? Or reds? Or all of them together.
Here you get to peek at one of my very early pieces when I was playing with what I called rainbow jade. I just kept pushing the idea of jade–the semi-translucence and inclusions often seen in it–using the basic mixing techniques common for faux jade but with unnatural colors and variation, not just between beads but within them. Because … why not?
So if you’re going to do faux stones and the like and you want to work on variation, why not look at doing what nature and tradition has not? Use different colors, different inclusions, and definitely different forms and motifs. We have the power to create that which never existed before. Embrace the power!
And … the Summer 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts is out! All print issues are in the mail and on the way and digital access was sent out to all subscribers last night. If you have a print issue coming, it takes 5-10 days so with the last of them mailed off this morning (and with Memorial Day in the midst of mailing time here) most of you should have it by the end of the month/first week of June. If you have a digital issue due to you but haven’t seen it in your inbox, check you spam/junk mail folders as they can get filtered there. Add connect@thepolymerarts.com to your safe sender list or address book to keep TPA mail from getting spam filtered.
And if you don’t have a copy on the way, go get it. This is a very cool, very packed issue. Talk about inspiration for variation … sheesh! Inclusions, hats, wall art, a huge list of covered object ideas, variation through collaboration, new wire findings ideas for polymer, changing up backgrounds for you photos and even variation in your selling technique to get more sales at shows! Much, much more of course. Get it here: www.thepolymerarts.com
Outside Inspiration: Drunk on Color
May 10, 2013
Inspirational Art
Today’s outside inspiration is quite different, not just for this blog but as a type of art work. What you see below is bourbon. No, that is not some indecipherable typo … the colors and visual texture is the result of photographing liquor under a microscope. How crazy and cool is that? These images are from BevShot, a company that photographs and sells images of favorite alcoholic beverages.
The liquor is “crystallized on a slide and shot under a polarized light microscope. As the light refracts through the beverage crystals, the resulting photos have naturally magnificent colors and composition.”
Yes, they do!
So what can we take away from this? Well, color inspiration for one, of course. Here’s nature again, being more stunning than we might imagine. You could create a dozen color palettes from the combinations here. The yellow, orange and magenta in the lower right, the yellow, magenta, purple in blue in the striations towards the top, the green, yellow and watermelon red in the center left portion … what great palettes!
There are two other things you can take from this art. One, look at the very microscopic world for some of the most amazing colors, textures and forms. Search for microscopic images and see what grabs you.
The other thing … look at this website. They have taken their beautiful imagery and transferred it onto all kinds of objects, not just wall art. As craft artists, most of us are used to creating functional items for sale but we tend to make the same kind of products. Why not stop and consider whether what you do with your jewelry can be applied to vases, boxes, swtichplates or other objects? Or what do you do with covered objects that you might be able to use to create wall art or jewelry. If you need to inject some fresh items into your line, looking at different forms using the same or adapted techniques might be just the thing.
Speaking of covered objects and wall art … the latest issue which includes extensive articles on both these subjects plus much more is off to the printer and will be getting mailed out directly from there end of next week. If you haven’t already subscribed, renewed or pre-ordered the new issue so you can get it in the first mailed batch, you can do so here at www.thepolymerarts.com/Subscribe.html The cut off date to get your orders in for the first print mailing will be end of day this Monday. The release date of the digital form of the Spring 2013 issue and the first day you might be able to expect the print issue to arrive at your door is May 22nd. So, soon. Very soon!
I found BevShot through Lindly Huanani’s website. Of course she’d have found this wonderful source of color.
Through a Stone Clearly
April 27, 2013
Inspirational Art
In this last post on translucent and polymer I thought I ought to touch upon one of the oldest ways to use translucent polymer… creating faux semi-precious stones.
I don’t know if there is any semi-precious stone we can’t emulate in polymer. There are so many options and with some of the new materials we now have–different types of inks, foils, and clays that weren’t available or known in polymer’s early days–it’s a wonder that there is not more faux stone experimenting going on. Not that there isn’t any. It may just be that I wish there was more. So you can just imagine how intrigued I was when I came across Ekaterina Gamayunova’s experiments with a number of semi-precious stones. You can see some of the wonderful results she got in this composite necklace.
The allure of semi-precious stones comes from the the variation of color, texture and the way light plays through their layers of transparency. To emulate that effect we need similar layers of transparency which we get with translucent clays and liquid polymer. But we don’t need to just copy nature. We have available the boundlessness of our imagination which gives us the ability to make “stones” that nature cannot. Why not pink or red jade? Agate with square or hexagonal ‘rings’ or purple malachite? We can do what nature cannot. It’s like a nature and artist collaboration. How cool is that?
If you want to explore (or re-explore) faux semi-precious stones, you might want start by reading Ekaterina’s post on her LiveJournal page. She includes process images of her agate technique along with explanations of how she attempted to achieve different effects for different types of stone so you too can try making some of your own. Might be just the ticket for some stress-free play time in the studio this weekend.
While Waiting for your Pardo Translucent Clay …
April 24, 2013
Inspirational Art
It’s funny how many comments and emails I got on Monday when I mentioned that I had untouched blocks of Pardo translucent clay in my studio. There is such a demand and yet so little available. I have had email conversations with a contact at Viva Decor but I never got a straight answer as to why its in such short supply or when we might expect to see it more readily available. So what’s a frustrated artist to do? As far as actually getting your hands on some, your best bet in the US seems to be getting on PolyClayPlay.com’s waiting list. (Is it any easier getting it in Europe by chance?)
In the meantime, I say go play with our other options. Pardo may be the clearest (so we’ve heard) but only in the clays themselves. The absolute clearest polymer you can work with is Fimo Decorating Gel. Although it can also be tough to locate in some places, it’s not impossible to get a hold of. (See our post last year regarding Fimo Gel and a false rumor; I listed places to find it.) You may not consider Fimo Gel to be a primary polymer to create forms with but with a little outside-the-box thinking, you’ll find you certainly can work with it as something other than an addition to the surface of clay.
Kathrin Neumaier has been playing extensively with both Pardo Translucent Art Clay and Fimo Gel, sometimes interchangeably. Here is a piece in Pardo Tranlucent clay (and what a fun piece!):
And here are basically the same forms but created in Fimo Gel:
So, yes, you can form pieces from liquid polymer and get a translucene as good if not better than with the elusive Pardo. And just think … there’s no conditioning!
The easiest way I found to work with liquid polymer as a form is to start out making sheets of cured lpc. You simply drizzle then lightly brush out the liquid polymer on a clean and very smooth, flat surface and bake it like that. A piece of tempered glass or polished sheet metal is an ideal surface. If you don’t have either, you can use a sheet of window glass (you can buy small panes at hardware stores or take the glass out of a picture frame) but you should put untempered glass into a cold oven and wait until it’s completely cooled before taking it out–rapid temperature changes can cause the glass to crack. (And tape up the raw glass edges with masking tape–let’s not cut ourselves!)
If the liquid polymer comes out of the oven still a little milky in spots wave a heat gun over it, keeping the heat a couple inches (50mm) away until it goes clear. (If you baked it on untempered glass, take it off the glass first.) Then you can cut whatever forms you want from that sheet. You can even add more liquid polymer to build it up or add color.
I would say about half the work I did in the first couple years I worked with polymer was created with lpc forms made this way and not just with Fimo Gel. After practicing for a bit, I could get any lpc to got completely clear. It just takes a little patience but its wonderful fun.
Kathrin has made all kinds of forms from liquid polymer including hollow beads and one piece collar necklaces. If you have the translucent bug, you need to take some time to browse through her Flickr pages for some inspiring ideas on what you might try while waiting for your Pardo.
The really, truly amazing and incredible thing about working with polymer … you can make ANYTHING you want out of the stuff. (Well, I have yet to see properly emulated hair but close!) The thing is, we have this medium that has few limitations and endless possibilities but so often when faux stone or other faux natural materials are created from it, it is in the common natural colors and usually even in the same traditional forms we’ve seen them for centuries. Now I know some stones are expensive and making them in polymer just allows for an inexpensive option. And I am all for making faux ivory rather than getting real ivory from the source. Making faux that looks just like we’d expect the real material to look does make sense but what doesn’t make sense is why more people don’t move beyond what nature and tradition has made?
Let’s take jade for example. We think of it as green and Asian. So we see tons of faux polymer jade in variations of green in simple beads or Asian motifs. Understandable. But why be limited by what has been done?
Desiree McCrorey has never approached anything in a traditional manner as far as I can tell and that penchant has resulted in some really unusual and beautiful work. I mean, have you ever seen jade like in the necklace here?
I don’t know how difficult if would be to carve real jade into such forms but since its so easy with polymer, why not take advantage of that capability and go beyond what is usually done with the real material?
And why always green? I remember wondering that in the first year I worked with polymer. Nature already makes all these beautiful variations of soft greens in jade. But why not bright blues? Or purples? Or reds? Or all of them together.
Here you get to peek at one of my very early pieces when I was playing with what I called rainbow jade. I just kept pushing the idea of jade–the semi-translucence and inclusions often seen in it–using the basic mixing techniques common for faux jade but with unnatural colors and variation, not just between beads but within them. Because … why not?
So if you’re going to do faux stones and the like and you want to work on variation, why not look at doing what nature and tradition has not? Use different colors, different inclusions, and definitely different forms and motifs. We have the power to create that which never existed before. Embrace the power!
And … the Summer 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts is out! All print issues are in the mail and on the way and digital access was sent out to all subscribers last night. If you have a print issue coming, it takes 5-10 days so with the last of them mailed off this morning (and with Memorial Day in the midst of mailing time here) most of you should have it by the end of the month/first week of June. If you have a digital issue due to you but haven’t seen it in your inbox, check you spam/junk mail folders as they can get filtered there. Add connect@thepolymerarts.com to your safe sender list or address book to keep TPA mail from getting spam filtered.
And if you don’t have a copy on the way, go get it. This is a very cool, very packed issue. Talk about inspiration for variation … sheesh! Inclusions, hats, wall art, a huge list of covered object ideas, variation through collaboration, new wire findings ideas for polymer, changing up backgrounds for you photos and even variation in your selling technique to get more sales at shows! Much, much more of course. Get it here: www.thepolymerarts.com
Read MoreToday’s outside inspiration is quite different, not just for this blog but as a type of art work. What you see below is bourbon. No, that is not some indecipherable typo … the colors and visual texture is the result of photographing liquor under a microscope. How crazy and cool is that? These images are from BevShot, a company that photographs and sells images of favorite alcoholic beverages.
The liquor is “crystallized on a slide and shot under a polarized light microscope. As the light refracts through the beverage crystals, the resulting photos have naturally magnificent colors and composition.”
Yes, they do!
So what can we take away from this? Well, color inspiration for one, of course. Here’s nature again, being more stunning than we might imagine. You could create a dozen color palettes from the combinations here. The yellow, orange and magenta in the lower right, the yellow, magenta, purple in blue in the striations towards the top, the green, yellow and watermelon red in the center left portion … what great palettes!
There are two other things you can take from this art. One, look at the very microscopic world for some of the most amazing colors, textures and forms. Search for microscopic images and see what grabs you.
The other thing … look at this website. They have taken their beautiful imagery and transferred it onto all kinds of objects, not just wall art. As craft artists, most of us are used to creating functional items for sale but we tend to make the same kind of products. Why not stop and consider whether what you do with your jewelry can be applied to vases, boxes, swtichplates or other objects? Or what do you do with covered objects that you might be able to use to create wall art or jewelry. If you need to inject some fresh items into your line, looking at different forms using the same or adapted techniques might be just the thing.
Speaking of covered objects and wall art … the latest issue which includes extensive articles on both these subjects plus much more is off to the printer and will be getting mailed out directly from there end of next week. If you haven’t already subscribed, renewed or pre-ordered the new issue so you can get it in the first mailed batch, you can do so here at www.thepolymerarts.com/Subscribe.html The cut off date to get your orders in for the first print mailing will be end of day this Monday. The release date of the digital form of the Spring 2013 issue and the first day you might be able to expect the print issue to arrive at your door is May 22nd. So, soon. Very soon!
I found BevShot through Lindly Huanani’s website. Of course she’d have found this wonderful source of color.
Read MoreIn this last post on translucent and polymer I thought I ought to touch upon one of the oldest ways to use translucent polymer… creating faux semi-precious stones.
I don’t know if there is any semi-precious stone we can’t emulate in polymer. There are so many options and with some of the new materials we now have–different types of inks, foils, and clays that weren’t available or known in polymer’s early days–it’s a wonder that there is not more faux stone experimenting going on. Not that there isn’t any. It may just be that I wish there was more. So you can just imagine how intrigued I was when I came across Ekaterina Gamayunova’s experiments with a number of semi-precious stones. You can see some of the wonderful results she got in this composite necklace.
The allure of semi-precious stones comes from the the variation of color, texture and the way light plays through their layers of transparency. To emulate that effect we need similar layers of transparency which we get with translucent clays and liquid polymer. But we don’t need to just copy nature. We have available the boundlessness of our imagination which gives us the ability to make “stones” that nature cannot. Why not pink or red jade? Agate with square or hexagonal ‘rings’ or purple malachite? We can do what nature cannot. It’s like a nature and artist collaboration. How cool is that?
If you want to explore (or re-explore) faux semi-precious stones, you might want start by reading Ekaterina’s post on her LiveJournal page. She includes process images of her agate technique along with explanations of how she attempted to achieve different effects for different types of stone so you too can try making some of your own. Might be just the ticket for some stress-free play time in the studio this weekend.
Read MoreIt’s funny how many comments and emails I got on Monday when I mentioned that I had untouched blocks of Pardo translucent clay in my studio. There is such a demand and yet so little available. I have had email conversations with a contact at Viva Decor but I never got a straight answer as to why its in such short supply or when we might expect to see it more readily available. So what’s a frustrated artist to do? As far as actually getting your hands on some, your best bet in the US seems to be getting on PolyClayPlay.com’s waiting list. (Is it any easier getting it in Europe by chance?)
In the meantime, I say go play with our other options. Pardo may be the clearest (so we’ve heard) but only in the clays themselves. The absolute clearest polymer you can work with is Fimo Decorating Gel. Although it can also be tough to locate in some places, it’s not impossible to get a hold of. (See our post last year regarding Fimo Gel and a false rumor; I listed places to find it.) You may not consider Fimo Gel to be a primary polymer to create forms with but with a little outside-the-box thinking, you’ll find you certainly can work with it as something other than an addition to the surface of clay.
Kathrin Neumaier has been playing extensively with both Pardo Translucent Art Clay and Fimo Gel, sometimes interchangeably. Here is a piece in Pardo Tranlucent clay (and what a fun piece!):
And here are basically the same forms but created in Fimo Gel:
So, yes, you can form pieces from liquid polymer and get a translucene as good if not better than with the elusive Pardo. And just think … there’s no conditioning!
The easiest way I found to work with liquid polymer as a form is to start out making sheets of cured lpc. You simply drizzle then lightly brush out the liquid polymer on a clean and very smooth, flat surface and bake it like that. A piece of tempered glass or polished sheet metal is an ideal surface. If you don’t have either, you can use a sheet of window glass (you can buy small panes at hardware stores or take the glass out of a picture frame) but you should put untempered glass into a cold oven and wait until it’s completely cooled before taking it out–rapid temperature changes can cause the glass to crack. (And tape up the raw glass edges with masking tape–let’s not cut ourselves!)
If the liquid polymer comes out of the oven still a little milky in spots wave a heat gun over it, keeping the heat a couple inches (50mm) away until it goes clear. (If you baked it on untempered glass, take it off the glass first.) Then you can cut whatever forms you want from that sheet. You can even add more liquid polymer to build it up or add color.
I would say about half the work I did in the first couple years I worked with polymer was created with lpc forms made this way and not just with Fimo Gel. After practicing for a bit, I could get any lpc to got completely clear. It just takes a little patience but its wonderful fun.
Kathrin has made all kinds of forms from liquid polymer including hollow beads and one piece collar necklaces. If you have the translucent bug, you need to take some time to browse through her Flickr pages for some inspiring ideas on what you might try while waiting for your Pardo.
Read More