The Purpose of Intention
February 9, 2020
Inspirational Art
How often, when you sit down to create something, do you think about why you’re doing it, the story behind what you are creating, or even just the theme or look? Apparently, it’s not overly common, at least not amongst the readers writing me this weekend.
Friday evening, I finally got the Virtual Art Box out after some technical difficulties that required a change of plans on the backend. I was a bit frazzled over reworking the technical stuff and, even though I was happy with the content I’d created, I was getting a bit nervous about how this new project would be received. But, as I wrote in the immersive design article for the Virtual Art Box project, things generally work out well when you have a particular idea in mind and you make all your decisions based on that overriding intention.
Well, my intention for the Virtual Art Box was to immerse the readers in a particular design idea that can be explored throughout the month. I was hoping that the primary design article, supported by the additional content the readers would journey through, would encourage them to really delve into the idea I presented in a purposeful and substantial way. But the question was, would they?
I thought it might be a bit of a challenge this first month since my chosen theme is conceptual rather than being a more concrete design element. But it’s just such an important concept in art. The immersive design theme this month is “Intention”. It’s simply the idea that when you sit down to create something, you can be more successful and have a more fulfilling creative experience if you have an overriding idea of what you are creating in terms of its purpose and its concept, concept being the theme, story, style or whatnot.
Well, I think my own intention to keep my focus on making the Virtual Art Box an immersive learning experience is working. Already. (Yay!) I have to say that I am a bit startled and overwhelmed by the reception of the project so far. In a community where publications, both in print and online, are dominated by project tutorials and things that are “easy and fun” (not that there’s anything wrong with fun at all!), my approach feels rather serious even though, as many of you may have seen, I do try to stay conversational and lighthearted and occasionally I just get silly. Art should be fun, and enjoyable, and fulfilling. But making good art in a truly fulfilling creative life does take work. I don’t know why I was worried that people wouldn’t want to put the work in. You, my readers, have always been pretty gung ho!
I already have a few Creative Pursuit challenge forms in (this is the part of the Box in which you create a self-challenge, and the form shares it with me and with you, and I help track it and keep you motivated.) It turns out, people look to be quick intrigued by the idea of working with intention. I love that I’m not the only art nerd who gets into things like that!
The thing is, I think intention is the core of all design. Without it, no matter how well you understand the various aspects of design, construction, workmanship, etc., it is difficult to create a successful design. Every piece of art needs a base, a core, a grounding concept from which the artist can build, otherwise the work risks being chaotic. It’s true that a chaotic design could work but only if it is the artist’s intention to create chaos. Then it has purpose. But chaos without intent is not art; it is just messy.
Intention not only gets you where you want to go but it helps guide your design choices along the way. When you make design choices based on what works for your overriding intention, the result will be a cohesive, purposeful, and, most likely, well-designed piece.
Now, I know, some of you are already thinking that you don’t want to think so deliberately about what you’re creating or that you just like to explore. Exploration, creating for the joy of it, and stream of consciousness creating are still processes with a particular intention. Because isn’t the success of a piece really measured against how well it fulfills your intention?
Let’s look at a few of the examples.
Debbie Crothers prefers to explore and make lots of pieces as she exhausts a technique or material’s possibilities. She doesn’t usually work with a finished piece in mind but, with extensive exploration as her intention, she finds success in much of what she does and ends up with undeniably stunning beads.
Joseph Barbaccia specializes in inspired polymer illustrations of people and things he admires and enjoys so his intention is to visually represent objects, places, and beings from his view point such as this great portrait of David Lynch.
In Melanie Muir’s Summer Seas in White cuff, you can see that from the colors to the patterns, even to how the patterns are tilted on the tilted square of the beads, this piece speaks of bright light on rippling ocean waters. Her intention is clear and all her design choices align with the intended look.
Are you starting to get the picture? If so, think about what your intention means to you and what you intention is next time you sit down to the studio table. And if this concept really intrigues you, even if you don’t want to subscribe, you can buy the Virtual Art Box for just the one month, get all the details and ideas I am offering on how to make intention a new and exciting tool for your creative work, and see how you like the Box.
Now, if you signed up for the Virtual Art Box and didn’t see your access email, check your spam folders. It went out Friday evening (PST). If you purchased it online (rather than had your prior magazine subscription balance transferred to the Virtual Art Box), you should find the PDF package download in your account on the website. If you expected it and can’t find it in either place, write me and we’ll get you fixed up.
And with that, I am off to relax a bit. Its been a bit of a marathon getting the new project off the ground but now that is has taken wing, it’s time to attend to me a bit and I am going to make that include some further intention … the intention to make studio time a priority at least a couple days a week. How do you ensure you get the creative time in that you need? Maybe we’ll look at that subject a bit this week as well.
In the meantime, have an intentionally, purposefully, and mindfully creative week!
Questioning Focus
July 7, 2019
Inspirational Art
“Fabiclay” brooch by Klio Tsaliki
Are you one of those people who finds an interesting path and goes down its until you find the end or do you like to wander about? I know that’s kind of a vague question, but you could apply it as a metaphor to goals in your life, the path of your career, or the way you create your artwork. I recently read some excerpts by Thomas Edison on the importance of keeping focused. He said, “The one prudence in life is concentration, the one evil is dissipation.” I don’t know if I wholly agree with that or, at least, I think it’s not so readily summed up in one tidy sentence.
I bet you can come up with at least a couple of artists off the top of your head who have come up with a treatment in polymer clay that they create with almost exclusively and have become quite masterful at it. But I think you come up with quite a few artists who consistently try different things, exploring, growing, and changing their style and focus on the artwork. Would you say that the person who focuses is probably doing better work than the person who is constantly exploring?
Perhaps it’s because we are talking about art that I can so readily dismiss Edison’s comment. I have always thought that, for most artists, art is about the exploration. I think if you find one technique and worked very hard to perfect it, you might get overly comfortable because you will more likely succeed with each successive piece as you hone your skill. And yes, I am presenting that as a possible problem. I am a strong believer in the value of messing up and creating pieces that “fail” on some level. It’s those experiences that really teach us and allow us to grow as artists. However, I do think that masterful artists who stick with one approach do, especially in their mind, make a lot of mistakes and have numerous pieces that failed or fell short of the artist’s expectations for every piece of work we would deem a masterpiece.
The bottom line is, I think whatever journey your imagination and curiosity leads you on is the right path to follow with your creative work. Don’t fight it if you like to stick with one technique and refine it over and over or if you get easily bored once you feel you’ve mastered something enough to understand it and want to move on to the next challenge. The journey of our creative process is as individual and unique as our own artwork.
Let’s look at a few examples of people on both sides of this coin – those dedicated to a primary technique and those that constantly change their focus. Then you can decide for yourself if Edison had a point or not.
Single Minded Tangents
There are so many artists that come to mind that focus on a single technique or process and have mastered it to a mind-blowing extent. Elise Winters is one of the first that comes to mind when it comes to technique. This surface treatment was her signature and her legacy and no one, that I’ve seen, has yet matched her skill with it.
When it comes to form, I don’t think anyone else in the polymer community has made more of the same form than Ron Lehocky with his hearts. But here’s an example of staying focused on one thing while exploring just about everything else you can. He’s made tens of thousands of hearts and no two are the same. Here are examples of the variations he came up with from a single Skinner blend.
One of the most masterful and single-minded people of process would have to be Jon Stuart Anderson with his cane covered animals and functional objects. Although caning is his focus as far as technique, he is constantly exploring pattern and how it affects the form. It’s a subtle exploration but if you look back through his work you’ll see how the application of pattern has changed over the years and how he is constantly exploring new forms to apply them to, working on how the new forms will show off the canes or how the canes will accentuate the forms.
I love this bowl below. It shows more “quiet space” with those swaths of black to red canes, than I think I’ve ever seen in his work before. The relatively unpatterned area so dramatically contrasts the complex canes designs but you can take in the individual cane and pattern placement more readily because the eye has a place to rest, giving you a moment to rest and to process more of what you’re seeing
This whole subject matter recalls to me a conversation Rosanna Faillace and I had with Melanie Muir in Rome last year. We were talking about people who stick with one technique and don’t branch out and Melanie, seeming to think it might be a negative thing, said “That’s me. I’m a one trick pony.” But of course, she’s not. She loves her inlaid mokume gane veneers, but she is constantly exploring construction and different forms on which to present these, resulting in pieces like this beautiful bracelet.
Frenetically Fabulous
I myself am of the exploratory variety of artists. I do wish I had a little more focus and could spend more time on any single technique, form, or process, but the thing is, my curiosity about what else I could do is a stronger driving force, so I go with that. There are a LOT of us artistic explorers in polymer art as polymer just cries out to be explored.
When it comes to an exploratory approach in polymer, Debbie Crothers is the first person who comes to mind. You can see her gorgeous acrylic on polymer beads on the front of the upcoming issue of The Polymer Studio. Her penchant for exploration is why she is writing the “Mix it Up” articles in the magazine. She always has something she’s playing around with and she does love to share. She does occasionally show the results of both her good and not so successful explorations, which I love because it demonstrates her willingness to try, to make mistakes, and to do the work over and over again until she has mastered it. It is highly unlikely that Debbie would have gotten the results she got in these beads below if she didn’t go through a lot of trial and error first. The final results are well worth the exploration!
Another person I’ve been following for years is Klio Tsaliki. She’ll try almost anything and, in the process, comes up with some great techniques and approaches. Some attempts come out better than others, but I love that she shares it all, or at least enough for us to see that she is not afraid to try anything that interests her. I find that very inspiring. A couple of years ago she was playing with metallic silkscreen and the possible fabric-like quality of polymer, as you can see in the opening photo of this post. More recently, she’s played with translucent clay and LED lights, as seen below.
Klio’s newest work has been in the up and coming new clay from Fimo, “Leather Effect”. Once cured, this clay is supposed to be very much like leather. You can see here on the Fimo website that it is very pliable and can be cut and even stitched. I don’t know about you, but I have never been so excited about a new line of polymer clay! It’s not available in the US yet, and I don’t know how widely distributed it is in Europe, but there is supposed to be news about that soon and, trust me, when it is available, I’m going to be playing with it quite a bit as leather was one of my first materials I made jewelry from. You can go to Klio’s Flickr photostream to see what she’s been doing with it.
Another name for exploration is pioneering. Pioneers need to explore their subject extensively to find those new and intriguing aspects that lead the rest of us to their fresh finds. In general, you’ll find that most of the folks we identify as polymer pioneers were and are highly exploratory. Just look at what Kathleen Dustin has done throughout her career. From ornate purses to translucent layered brooches to reinterpretations of textile patterns such as with these new brooches below, you never really know what Kathleen will be working on next and yet, all her work is masterfully constructed and impeccably finished. I think her exploration keeps her work fresh for us and, most especially, for her and her passion for her work.
Focus on Yourself
So, as you see, there are many approaches to the creative process, all of which have value and result in beautiful, emotive, and inspiring work. So, no, I don’t think focus and concentration on one technique, form, or even material, is necessary but I do think keeping a sharp focus on the overriding creative goal – to make fulfilling artwork, financially supportive artwork, satiating your curiosity, or whatever the important creative motivation is for you – is something to keep a watchful eye on.
Speaking of focus … The construction on my house is in the finishing stages now. That hasn’t helped me with my focus on getting the next issue out, neither has my tendinitis and back issue which was such a huge problem last year. The thing is, in the last year, I have not really had enough time off to completely heal and am having issues again. I’m pretty sure I can get this issue to the printer in time to have it out by the end of the month but I’m probably going to have a heart-to-heart with my doctor on what I really need to do to get this healed and am working out a bit of time off later this month. This is one area where keeping focus would be very helpful!
I will keep you apprised of any shakeups in production if you are a subscriber to The Polymer Studio so just stay tuned here. And next week maybe I can get you pictures of the house for those of you who are curious. Everything’s under plastic wrap right now as they finish plastering and painting. But it’s horribly exciting seeing it come together!
So, I will leave you with these thoughts on focus and exploration. I hope it brings you some interesting insights for your own process and work. Have a fabulous week!
The Look of Burning Embers
January 8, 2015
Inspirational Art
Don’t you love embers? Those lively, sparking, crawling fires inside a burning log that move in a seemingly choreographed dance? They are mesmerizing and calming and one of the neatest things about sitting in front of a fire and relaxing. I have tried emulating them in polymer. You can even see one of my modest attempts in an article on faux organics in the Fall 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts. But this particular photo of a copper inlaid bracelet created by Adriana Allen really seems to capture the light and liveliness of them.
It doesn’t seem that Adriana intended to create an ember-like appearance with the rubbed-in foil, but it sure gives one an idea about how to go about creating something like this. The way the copper is more rubbed off in the more open indentations and denser in the thinner lines does emulate that variation in the ember of a burning coal. It is lovely, as is the blue clay contrasting the orange of the copper.
Adriana creates beautiful cuff bracelets with a lot of texture, leaning heavily on faux antiquing and patina to get her signature look. Take a look through her Etsy shop for more beauties and ideas, while I go give my lively 8 month old German Shepard some much needed attention. Her name, by the way, is Ember.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
How often, when you sit down to create something, do you think about why you’re doing it, the story behind what you are creating, or even just the theme or look? Apparently, it’s not overly common, at least not amongst the readers writing me this weekend.
Friday evening, I finally got the Virtual Art Box out after some technical difficulties that required a change of plans on the backend. I was a bit frazzled over reworking the technical stuff and, even though I was happy with the content I’d created, I was getting a bit nervous about how this new project would be received. But, as I wrote in the immersive design article for the Virtual Art Box project, things generally work out well when you have a particular idea in mind and you make all your decisions based on that overriding intention.
Well, my intention for the Virtual Art Box was to immerse the readers in a particular design idea that can be explored throughout the month. I was hoping that the primary design article, supported by the additional content the readers would journey through, would encourage them to really delve into the idea I presented in a purposeful and substantial way. But the question was, would they?
I thought it might be a bit of a challenge this first month since my chosen theme is conceptual rather than being a more concrete design element. But it’s just such an important concept in art. The immersive design theme this month is “Intention”. It’s simply the idea that when you sit down to create something, you can be more successful and have a more fulfilling creative experience if you have an overriding idea of what you are creating in terms of its purpose and its concept, concept being the theme, story, style or whatnot.
Well, I think my own intention to keep my focus on making the Virtual Art Box an immersive learning experience is working. Already. (Yay!) I have to say that I am a bit startled and overwhelmed by the reception of the project so far. In a community where publications, both in print and online, are dominated by project tutorials and things that are “easy and fun” (not that there’s anything wrong with fun at all!), my approach feels rather serious even though, as many of you may have seen, I do try to stay conversational and lighthearted and occasionally I just get silly. Art should be fun, and enjoyable, and fulfilling. But making good art in a truly fulfilling creative life does take work. I don’t know why I was worried that people wouldn’t want to put the work in. You, my readers, have always been pretty gung ho!
I already have a few Creative Pursuit challenge forms in (this is the part of the Box in which you create a self-challenge, and the form shares it with me and with you, and I help track it and keep you motivated.) It turns out, people look to be quick intrigued by the idea of working with intention. I love that I’m not the only art nerd who gets into things like that!
The thing is, I think intention is the core of all design. Without it, no matter how well you understand the various aspects of design, construction, workmanship, etc., it is difficult to create a successful design. Every piece of art needs a base, a core, a grounding concept from which the artist can build, otherwise the work risks being chaotic. It’s true that a chaotic design could work but only if it is the artist’s intention to create chaos. Then it has purpose. But chaos without intent is not art; it is just messy.
Intention not only gets you where you want to go but it helps guide your design choices along the way. When you make design choices based on what works for your overriding intention, the result will be a cohesive, purposeful, and, most likely, well-designed piece.
Now, I know, some of you are already thinking that you don’t want to think so deliberately about what you’re creating or that you just like to explore. Exploration, creating for the joy of it, and stream of consciousness creating are still processes with a particular intention. Because isn’t the success of a piece really measured against how well it fulfills your intention?
Let’s look at a few of the examples.
Debbie Crothers prefers to explore and make lots of pieces as she exhausts a technique or material’s possibilities. She doesn’t usually work with a finished piece in mind but, with extensive exploration as her intention, she finds success in much of what she does and ends up with undeniably stunning beads.
Joseph Barbaccia specializes in inspired polymer illustrations of people and things he admires and enjoys so his intention is to visually represent objects, places, and beings from his view point such as this great portrait of David Lynch.
In Melanie Muir’s Summer Seas in White cuff, you can see that from the colors to the patterns, even to how the patterns are tilted on the tilted square of the beads, this piece speaks of bright light on rippling ocean waters. Her intention is clear and all her design choices align with the intended look.
Are you starting to get the picture? If so, think about what your intention means to you and what you intention is next time you sit down to the studio table. And if this concept really intrigues you, even if you don’t want to subscribe, you can buy the Virtual Art Box for just the one month, get all the details and ideas I am offering on how to make intention a new and exciting tool for your creative work, and see how you like the Box.
Now, if you signed up for the Virtual Art Box and didn’t see your access email, check your spam folders. It went out Friday evening (PST). If you purchased it online (rather than had your prior magazine subscription balance transferred to the Virtual Art Box), you should find the PDF package download in your account on the website. If you expected it and can’t find it in either place, write me and we’ll get you fixed up.
And with that, I am off to relax a bit. Its been a bit of a marathon getting the new project off the ground but now that is has taken wing, it’s time to attend to me a bit and I am going to make that include some further intention … the intention to make studio time a priority at least a couple days a week. How do you ensure you get the creative time in that you need? Maybe we’ll look at that subject a bit this week as well.
In the meantime, have an intentionally, purposefully, and mindfully creative week!
Read More“Fabiclay” brooch by Klio Tsaliki
Are you one of those people who finds an interesting path and goes down its until you find the end or do you like to wander about? I know that’s kind of a vague question, but you could apply it as a metaphor to goals in your life, the path of your career, or the way you create your artwork. I recently read some excerpts by Thomas Edison on the importance of keeping focused. He said, “The one prudence in life is concentration, the one evil is dissipation.” I don’t know if I wholly agree with that or, at least, I think it’s not so readily summed up in one tidy sentence.
I bet you can come up with at least a couple of artists off the top of your head who have come up with a treatment in polymer clay that they create with almost exclusively and have become quite masterful at it. But I think you come up with quite a few artists who consistently try different things, exploring, growing, and changing their style and focus on the artwork. Would you say that the person who focuses is probably doing better work than the person who is constantly exploring?
Perhaps it’s because we are talking about art that I can so readily dismiss Edison’s comment. I have always thought that, for most artists, art is about the exploration. I think if you find one technique and worked very hard to perfect it, you might get overly comfortable because you will more likely succeed with each successive piece as you hone your skill. And yes, I am presenting that as a possible problem. I am a strong believer in the value of messing up and creating pieces that “fail” on some level. It’s those experiences that really teach us and allow us to grow as artists. However, I do think that masterful artists who stick with one approach do, especially in their mind, make a lot of mistakes and have numerous pieces that failed or fell short of the artist’s expectations for every piece of work we would deem a masterpiece.
The bottom line is, I think whatever journey your imagination and curiosity leads you on is the right path to follow with your creative work. Don’t fight it if you like to stick with one technique and refine it over and over or if you get easily bored once you feel you’ve mastered something enough to understand it and want to move on to the next challenge. The journey of our creative process is as individual and unique as our own artwork.
Let’s look at a few examples of people on both sides of this coin – those dedicated to a primary technique and those that constantly change their focus. Then you can decide for yourself if Edison had a point or not.
Single Minded Tangents
There are so many artists that come to mind that focus on a single technique or process and have mastered it to a mind-blowing extent. Elise Winters is one of the first that comes to mind when it comes to technique. This surface treatment was her signature and her legacy and no one, that I’ve seen, has yet matched her skill with it.
When it comes to form, I don’t think anyone else in the polymer community has made more of the same form than Ron Lehocky with his hearts. But here’s an example of staying focused on one thing while exploring just about everything else you can. He’s made tens of thousands of hearts and no two are the same. Here are examples of the variations he came up with from a single Skinner blend.
One of the most masterful and single-minded people of process would have to be Jon Stuart Anderson with his cane covered animals and functional objects. Although caning is his focus as far as technique, he is constantly exploring pattern and how it affects the form. It’s a subtle exploration but if you look back through his work you’ll see how the application of pattern has changed over the years and how he is constantly exploring new forms to apply them to, working on how the new forms will show off the canes or how the canes will accentuate the forms.
I love this bowl below. It shows more “quiet space” with those swaths of black to red canes, than I think I’ve ever seen in his work before. The relatively unpatterned area so dramatically contrasts the complex canes designs but you can take in the individual cane and pattern placement more readily because the eye has a place to rest, giving you a moment to rest and to process more of what you’re seeing
This whole subject matter recalls to me a conversation Rosanna Faillace and I had with Melanie Muir in Rome last year. We were talking about people who stick with one technique and don’t branch out and Melanie, seeming to think it might be a negative thing, said “That’s me. I’m a one trick pony.” But of course, she’s not. She loves her inlaid mokume gane veneers, but she is constantly exploring construction and different forms on which to present these, resulting in pieces like this beautiful bracelet.
Frenetically Fabulous
I myself am of the exploratory variety of artists. I do wish I had a little more focus and could spend more time on any single technique, form, or process, but the thing is, my curiosity about what else I could do is a stronger driving force, so I go with that. There are a LOT of us artistic explorers in polymer art as polymer just cries out to be explored.
When it comes to an exploratory approach in polymer, Debbie Crothers is the first person who comes to mind. You can see her gorgeous acrylic on polymer beads on the front of the upcoming issue of The Polymer Studio. Her penchant for exploration is why she is writing the “Mix it Up” articles in the magazine. She always has something she’s playing around with and she does love to share. She does occasionally show the results of both her good and not so successful explorations, which I love because it demonstrates her willingness to try, to make mistakes, and to do the work over and over again until she has mastered it. It is highly unlikely that Debbie would have gotten the results she got in these beads below if she didn’t go through a lot of trial and error first. The final results are well worth the exploration!
Another person I’ve been following for years is Klio Tsaliki. She’ll try almost anything and, in the process, comes up with some great techniques and approaches. Some attempts come out better than others, but I love that she shares it all, or at least enough for us to see that she is not afraid to try anything that interests her. I find that very inspiring. A couple of years ago she was playing with metallic silkscreen and the possible fabric-like quality of polymer, as you can see in the opening photo of this post. More recently, she’s played with translucent clay and LED lights, as seen below.
Klio’s newest work has been in the up and coming new clay from Fimo, “Leather Effect”. Once cured, this clay is supposed to be very much like leather. You can see here on the Fimo website that it is very pliable and can be cut and even stitched. I don’t know about you, but I have never been so excited about a new line of polymer clay! It’s not available in the US yet, and I don’t know how widely distributed it is in Europe, but there is supposed to be news about that soon and, trust me, when it is available, I’m going to be playing with it quite a bit as leather was one of my first materials I made jewelry from. You can go to Klio’s Flickr photostream to see what she’s been doing with it.
Another name for exploration is pioneering. Pioneers need to explore their subject extensively to find those new and intriguing aspects that lead the rest of us to their fresh finds. In general, you’ll find that most of the folks we identify as polymer pioneers were and are highly exploratory. Just look at what Kathleen Dustin has done throughout her career. From ornate purses to translucent layered brooches to reinterpretations of textile patterns such as with these new brooches below, you never really know what Kathleen will be working on next and yet, all her work is masterfully constructed and impeccably finished. I think her exploration keeps her work fresh for us and, most especially, for her and her passion for her work.
Focus on Yourself
So, as you see, there are many approaches to the creative process, all of which have value and result in beautiful, emotive, and inspiring work. So, no, I don’t think focus and concentration on one technique, form, or even material, is necessary but I do think keeping a sharp focus on the overriding creative goal – to make fulfilling artwork, financially supportive artwork, satiating your curiosity, or whatever the important creative motivation is for you – is something to keep a watchful eye on.
Speaking of focus … The construction on my house is in the finishing stages now. That hasn’t helped me with my focus on getting the next issue out, neither has my tendinitis and back issue which was such a huge problem last year. The thing is, in the last year, I have not really had enough time off to completely heal and am having issues again. I’m pretty sure I can get this issue to the printer in time to have it out by the end of the month but I’m probably going to have a heart-to-heart with my doctor on what I really need to do to get this healed and am working out a bit of time off later this month. This is one area where keeping focus would be very helpful!
I will keep you apprised of any shakeups in production if you are a subscriber to The Polymer Studio so just stay tuned here. And next week maybe I can get you pictures of the house for those of you who are curious. Everything’s under plastic wrap right now as they finish plastering and painting. But it’s horribly exciting seeing it come together!
So, I will leave you with these thoughts on focus and exploration. I hope it brings you some interesting insights for your own process and work. Have a fabulous week!
Read More
Don’t you love embers? Those lively, sparking, crawling fires inside a burning log that move in a seemingly choreographed dance? They are mesmerizing and calming and one of the neatest things about sitting in front of a fire and relaxing. I have tried emulating them in polymer. You can even see one of my modest attempts in an article on faux organics in the Fall 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts. But this particular photo of a copper inlaid bracelet created by Adriana Allen really seems to capture the light and liveliness of them.
It doesn’t seem that Adriana intended to create an ember-like appearance with the rubbed-in foil, but it sure gives one an idea about how to go about creating something like this. The way the copper is more rubbed off in the more open indentations and denser in the thinner lines does emulate that variation in the ember of a burning coal. It is lovely, as is the blue clay contrasting the orange of the copper.
Adriana creates beautiful cuff bracelets with a lot of texture, leaning heavily on faux antiquing and patina to get her signature look. Take a look through her Etsy shop for more beauties and ideas, while I go give my lively 8 month old German Shepard some much needed attention. Her name, by the way, is Ember.
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
