Capturing Deepening Light

September 17, 2014

Angee Chase sunset farm painting

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.

14-P3 Fall-Play cover Full sm   Blog2 -2014-02Feb-2   3d star ad  Polymania Advert 125  tpa-125x125-blog   Faux-Glass-Banner-1000px-600x476

What We See in Lines

October 8, 2013

We’ve all doodled at some point. There’s something addictive about putting an inactive pen or pencil to paper and drawing random lines, allowing them to be aimless and formless until perhaps we see something in our doodles and from it create an actual image or design. I’m sure you’ve done that same kind of thing in clay, whether you equated it to doodling or not. The random, seemingly aimless lines we draw or carve or lay out with a snake of clay are suggestions of things that already exist out there in the world. Like looking for shapes in the clouds, our minds will see an object or creature or other symbol in the clay, if you give them a little time.

I think this may have something to do with the fact that you can find similar lines in nature for almost any line you randomly come up with. However, nature’s lines are rarely aimless. The winding path of a stream or river, the marks of receded waves in the sand, or the undulating profile of a mountain range on the horizon are all lines that don’t have consistency or focal points, but are still very purposeful—they are the result of change and action and define some feature of nature. Seeing this, I think we want to find purpose in lines that look random and decide what they might define. That would be why you would look at these earrings by Lina Brusnika and see in the layer of undulating lines a landscape, maybe hills or a beach at sunset. Lina looks to live in Kamchatka, a peninsula in the far east of Russia. Her posted photos on LiveJournal of beaches and sunsets make me think she had these views on her mind when she created these.

10046437826_840d82c4a2

We as humans want to see our world in every line; so consider how your lines, especially the ones you think of as abstract, might be viewed. Usually what you think you see in it will be how at least some others will see it. So if your aimless lines look like vines, you might continue with the plant theme by adding leaf-like flicks of clay for accents. Or if they are rather straight and precise, a very graphic look might be developed from those. If you want to work with a particular set of colors, what do they represent to you? If they remind you of a tropical beach, then simple, soft lines representative of an open beach, the ripple of waves on the ocean, and/or the waving fronds of palm trees might work well and will likely be recognized by the viewer of the work, since the colors and lines are both associated with such a scene.

So doodle away with pen or clay and see where the lines take you.

Skies on Fire

July 17, 2013

There is nothing quite like a stunningly colorful sunset, the way the sky appears to be on fire and how the glow of it colors everything you see. But in art, portraying sunsets is a tricky business. Overdone and often associated with tawdry craft and cheap commercialism, sunsets are rarely given a visual voice anymore in fine art and craft. So to find these earrings by Janet Wilson with the poor mistreated sunset as inspiration was a delightful surprise, not to mention some truly eye-catching work.

3098456881_1bab6c13d9

 

I think the draw here is not just the fiery color but the change in texture from the ends that look like they are disintegrating and melting from the heat to the smooth austere red that peaks at the top with spare barren branches etched in them.  Nothing complex, just calmly compelling, very much like the beauty of a great sunset.

Janet Wilson’s sculpted, scratched, and antiqued nature inspired work can be found on both her Flickr pages and in her Etsy shop.

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Capturing Deepening Light

September 17, 2014
Posted in

Angee Chase sunset farm painting

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.

14-P3 Fall-Play cover Full sm   Blog2 -2014-02Feb-2   3d star ad  Polymania Advert 125  tpa-125x125-blog   Faux-Glass-Banner-1000px-600x476

Read More

What We See in Lines

October 8, 2013
Posted in

We’ve all doodled at some point. There’s something addictive about putting an inactive pen or pencil to paper and drawing random lines, allowing them to be aimless and formless until perhaps we see something in our doodles and from it create an actual image or design. I’m sure you’ve done that same kind of thing in clay, whether you equated it to doodling or not. The random, seemingly aimless lines we draw or carve or lay out with a snake of clay are suggestions of things that already exist out there in the world. Like looking for shapes in the clouds, our minds will see an object or creature or other symbol in the clay, if you give them a little time.

I think this may have something to do with the fact that you can find similar lines in nature for almost any line you randomly come up with. However, nature’s lines are rarely aimless. The winding path of a stream or river, the marks of receded waves in the sand, or the undulating profile of a mountain range on the horizon are all lines that don’t have consistency or focal points, but are still very purposeful—they are the result of change and action and define some feature of nature. Seeing this, I think we want to find purpose in lines that look random and decide what they might define. That would be why you would look at these earrings by Lina Brusnika and see in the layer of undulating lines a landscape, maybe hills or a beach at sunset. Lina looks to live in Kamchatka, a peninsula in the far east of Russia. Her posted photos on LiveJournal of beaches and sunsets make me think she had these views on her mind when she created these.

10046437826_840d82c4a2

We as humans want to see our world in every line; so consider how your lines, especially the ones you think of as abstract, might be viewed. Usually what you think you see in it will be how at least some others will see it. So if your aimless lines look like vines, you might continue with the plant theme by adding leaf-like flicks of clay for accents. Or if they are rather straight and precise, a very graphic look might be developed from those. If you want to work with a particular set of colors, what do they represent to you? If they remind you of a tropical beach, then simple, soft lines representative of an open beach, the ripple of waves on the ocean, and/or the waving fronds of palm trees might work well and will likely be recognized by the viewer of the work, since the colors and lines are both associated with such a scene.

So doodle away with pen or clay and see where the lines take you.

Read More

Skies on Fire

July 17, 2013
Posted in

There is nothing quite like a stunningly colorful sunset, the way the sky appears to be on fire and how the glow of it colors everything you see. But in art, portraying sunsets is a tricky business. Overdone and often associated with tawdry craft and cheap commercialism, sunsets are rarely given a visual voice anymore in fine art and craft. So to find these earrings by Janet Wilson with the poor mistreated sunset as inspiration was a delightful surprise, not to mention some truly eye-catching work.

3098456881_1bab6c13d9

 

I think the draw here is not just the fiery color but the change in texture from the ends that look like they are disintegrating and melting from the heat to the smooth austere red that peaks at the top with spare barren branches etched in them.  Nothing complex, just calmly compelling, very much like the beauty of a great sunset.

Janet Wilson’s sculpted, scratched, and antiqued nature inspired work can be found on both her Flickr pages and in her Etsy shop.

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Read More
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