Get Caning!
July 13, 2013
Technique tutorials, Tips and Tricks
So my request earlier this week to have people send in caning links for this week’s theme resulted in more questions from people just getting into it. Since there were so many queries, I thought I ought to take a moment to address the basic question these emails had in common … how does one get started or work on moving on from the basics? (For those of you who are quite advanced, this list and links might be helpful as a list for your website [I imagine you get these questions too!] or to recommend before a caning class to get your students to work on the basics.)
So here’s what I would recommend if you are starting out caning …
1. Take a class. So much of what goes into caning, especially reducing, is rather difficult to explain without hands on demonstrations. Check with local guilds, bead stores, the IPCA website, and The Polymer Arts resource list to see what is going on near you. A keyword search using your state/country, “polymer” and “classes” or “workshops” might bring up a few things as well.
2. Get a book. A book with a lot of detail and variety of projects to try your hand at could get you far. Some of the better ones I know of are Sue Heaser’s Polymer Clay Jewellery for Beginners: Book 1 – Millefiori Canes,
Donna Kato’s The Art of Polymer Clay Millefiori Techniques and Patricia Kimle’s Exploring Canework in Polymer Clay: Color, Pattern, Surface Design.
3. Search the internet for caning tutorials. This will give you a broad variety of techniques and approaches to explore. If you’re a self-starter and really motivated, this is usually the least expensive option as many of the beginning cane tutorials are free. Once you get more advanced, you may want to invest in some of the tutorials sold on Etsy and CraftArtEdu.
One of your fellow readers, Meg Newberg, sent along this link of free cane tutorials which she also regularly posts on her very active Facebook page, Polymer Clay Workshop. Here is a post photo from her Facebook page a few months back that I thought was just a beautiful collection of kaleidoscope canes with nicely chosen color schemes that she was working on.
As I am admittedly not the caning expert and so many of you are, please do add your thoughts in the comment section if you have further ideas for those new to caning. Many thanks!
Color Studies
May 6, 2013
Inspirational Art
I thought this week, we’d just look at color. Because who here doesn’t like that? For most of us it’s such a primary part of working with polymer. How can we resist with all those gorgeous colorful blocks enticing us to create something that honors our fascination with them?
And then we condition and roll, cut and punch, form and wrestle, combine and rearrange and eventually we have this finished piece that, somehow, doesn’t quite reflect what we were after. When it comes to color, even for those of us who can often combine them intuitively, study and practice is what will bring about success in taking the designs from inside our head onto our studio tables.
There are a number of ways to study color and that, I promise, are not at all dull times. What you learn can be immediately turned into beautiful creations. These pendants by Austria’s Carina are studies in complementary and tertiary colors. Now, tell me you would have not enjoyed creating something like these?
Your own personal exploration and study of color can begin (or continue) through a number of options we have available. For polymer specific color studies, there is nothing that comes close to the depth of Lindly Huanani and Maggie Maggio’s book Polymer Clay Color Inspirations. Honestly, if there was one book I’d expect to see on every serious polymer artist’s shelf, it’s this book. It doesn’t matter where you are in your journey as a polymer artist, you will learn something new and maybe even game changing for you.
If you want a quick brush up on terms and why these concepts are important (since we’ll be talking about them all week, it might be good to refamiliarize yourself with them) you can do so on websites like this one: http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory
I’ll also share one of my favorite color pages on all the web … this is a kind of shortcut to figuring out color combinations and it’s also a little addictive. You click on a color on the color wheel and then you can run through a range of possible color combination types. I get lost in the possibilities: http://colorschemedesigner.com/
So go play with color today, online at least if not in the studio. Getting lost in color sounds like a great way to start a week.
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.
So my request earlier this week to have people send in caning links for this week’s theme resulted in more questions from people just getting into it. Since there were so many queries, I thought I ought to take a moment to address the basic question these emails had in common … how does one get started or work on moving on from the basics? (For those of you who are quite advanced, this list and links might be helpful as a list for your website [I imagine you get these questions too!] or to recommend before a caning class to get your students to work on the basics.)
So here’s what I would recommend if you are starting out caning …
1. Take a class. So much of what goes into caning, especially reducing, is rather difficult to explain without hands on demonstrations. Check with local guilds, bead stores, the IPCA website, and The Polymer Arts resource list to see what is going on near you. A keyword search using your state/country, “polymer” and “classes” or “workshops” might bring up a few things as well.
2. Get a book. A book with a lot of detail and variety of projects to try your hand at could get you far. Some of the better ones I know of are Sue Heaser’s Polymer Clay Jewellery for Beginners: Book 1 – Millefiori Canes,
Donna Kato’s The Art of Polymer Clay Millefiori Techniques and Patricia Kimle’s Exploring Canework in Polymer Clay: Color, Pattern, Surface Design.
3. Search the internet for caning tutorials. This will give you a broad variety of techniques and approaches to explore. If you’re a self-starter and really motivated, this is usually the least expensive option as many of the beginning cane tutorials are free. Once you get more advanced, you may want to invest in some of the tutorials sold on Etsy and CraftArtEdu.
One of your fellow readers, Meg Newberg, sent along this link of free cane tutorials which she also regularly posts on her very active Facebook page, Polymer Clay Workshop. Here is a post photo from her Facebook page a few months back that I thought was just a beautiful collection of kaleidoscope canes with nicely chosen color schemes that she was working on.
As I am admittedly not the caning expert and so many of you are, please do add your thoughts in the comment section if you have further ideas for those new to caning. Many thanks!
I thought this week, we’d just look at color. Because who here doesn’t like that? For most of us it’s such a primary part of working with polymer. How can we resist with all those gorgeous colorful blocks enticing us to create something that honors our fascination with them?
And then we condition and roll, cut and punch, form and wrestle, combine and rearrange and eventually we have this finished piece that, somehow, doesn’t quite reflect what we were after. When it comes to color, even for those of us who can often combine them intuitively, study and practice is what will bring about success in taking the designs from inside our head onto our studio tables.
There are a number of ways to study color and that, I promise, are not at all dull times. What you learn can be immediately turned into beautiful creations. These pendants by Austria’s Carina are studies in complementary and tertiary colors. Now, tell me you would have not enjoyed creating something like these?
Your own personal exploration and study of color can begin (or continue) through a number of options we have available. For polymer specific color studies, there is nothing that comes close to the depth of Lindly Huanani and Maggie Maggio’s book Polymer Clay Color Inspirations. Honestly, if there was one book I’d expect to see on every serious polymer artist’s shelf, it’s this book. It doesn’t matter where you are in your journey as a polymer artist, you will learn something new and maybe even game changing for you.
If you want a quick brush up on terms and why these concepts are important (since we’ll be talking about them all week, it might be good to refamiliarize yourself with them) you can do so on websites like this one: http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory
I’ll also share one of my favorite color pages on all the web … this is a kind of shortcut to figuring out color combinations and it’s also a little addictive. You click on a color on the color wheel and then you can run through a range of possible color combination types. I get lost in the possibilities: http://colorschemedesigner.com/
So go play with color today, online at least if not in the studio. Getting lost in color sounds like a great way to start a week.
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