All It’s Cracked Up To Be

March 17, 2019

What is it about weathered and worn surfaces that so many people find attractive these days? Mind you, I am very much one of them. I have a whole line of work called “Beautiful Decay” that explores the beauty I find in the deterioration of durable materials. But the one related effect that seems to be everywhere these days is crackling. Who doesn’t love a good crackle! From shabby chic furniture to crazed ceramics to crackle glass decor, the look of a deteriorating surface seems to have wide-ranging appeal.

Knowing that, it’s not really a surprise that crackle is so popular as a polymer technique. A great many of us are already texture fiends and, if you love texture then you are going to try crackle- so there’s one of the reasons for its popularity in polymer. But we also know that there is a market for work with crackled surfaces since it pops up in so many areas related to decoration and adornment, making it a safe bet if you sell your work.

There is no one right or best way to create a crackled surface in polymer. You may not have realized it, but there are literally dozens of ways to create crackle. It can be created with a crackle paint medium, partially cured layers of polymer (like I show you in my Controlled Crackle technique which you can find in your Fall 2011 edition of The Polymer Arts), dried paint (or glaze or gilders’ paste or floor wax) on raw clay, metal leaf on raw clay, leaching, alcohol treatments, or by creating a faux texture with impressed materials. And I know I am still missing a few in that list!

So, let’s enjoy some crackle work today and wrap up with a few tutorials on different crackle techniques that you can try out.

 

Let’s Get Cracking

One of my personal favorite “cracklers” is Staci Louise Smith. She uses a number of different techniques to achieve a wide range of cracked texture. In the necklace below, her crackle is not subtle. It is not evenly spread across her beads either but rather, it is rough and tumble and scattered in energetic horizontal lines. Her soft coloring calms the chaos of the crackle which is also balanced out by the many other purposeful accents and lines from the wire.

Staci can also do subtle as evidenced by the opening piece, a Balance Bowl from her tutorial in the Polymer Art Projects – Organic book. (You can get the book on our website if you want to make one of these stunning bowls.)

Check out this blog post where she shares how she makes the necklace here along with sketches and her thoughts on the process.

 

A subtle crackle can often take a bit more patience but what a lovely effect it can have. It may not even be obvious at first that the beads on this necklace below by Ursa Polak have a crackle surface, but the weathered feel comes across immediately. Take a close look to see all the fine-lined cracks that add to the depth and variation of the surface.

 

Kroma Crackle is a lovely gel medium that itself dries and cracks without having to stretch the clay and yet remains flexible so that you can manipulate the clay without the cracked material popping off. Once you worked with it for a bit you can control the size of the crackle pretty well. You can add small amounts of acrylic paint or mica powders to give yourself a wide variety of color options. You can also apply paints, inks, dyes and other colorants on it after its dry.

These earrings are by Els van Haasen uses Kroma Crackle on polymer. You can see how regular a crackle you can get with this medium. But it can definitely be quite varied once you come to understand how to use it.

 

You almost forget that the technique that was most commonly used by the highly esteemed Elise Winters, who we lost just this year, was also a crackle technique. Her work was very controlled, as was crackle but that was probably the most recognizable part about her signature style. I can only imagine the work she put into gaining such control over her crackle, but it just shows what can be done when we invest a bit of patience into our work. (I erroneously put in that this was metal leaf when I first posted but, no, it’s paint, which also takes such skilled control, having to ensure that the paint is evenly applied to get such fine crackle.)

 

This is actually a piece of mine from some years back. It includes alcohol treated raw clay, controlled cracking of partially cured clay, and metal leaf colored with alcohol ink. The alcohol treatment is a way of drying out the surface of raw clay to get a very fine crazing. It’s a bit of a tricky technique but it sure worked here. That helped create the uneven surface of the partially cured polymer under the metal leaf, giving it a burning ember look.

 

Let’s Crack You Up

Ready to try some various cracking techniques? Here are a few freebies to get you going:

If you want to try the straightforward Paint Crackle Techniques:

  • Grab a craft acrylic (the cheap acrylics work better than artist tube acrylics which tend to stretch rather than crack) or tempera paint and a well-conditioned sheet of polymer rolled on the thickest setting of your pasta machine.
  • Brush a moderate (not heavy) layer of the paint onto the polymer. Wait for it to completely dry.
  • Then roll it through the pasta machine set at two settings down from the thickness you created the sheet on. You can stop here or, for wider, more varied crackle, turn the sheet 90°, adjust the pasta machine down another one or two settings and run it through again.
  • You should have a nice crackle now but if your paint is stretching rather than cracking, rolling another sheet of polymer and lay the crackle sheet on top and then start rolling it through the pasta machine again. Eventually, the paint will crack but sometimes you need a really thick layer of polymer to start in order to stretch it far enough. Tempera paint won’t stretch and cracks very nicely if you have that on hand or fancy a run to your local craft store. You could also get some crackle medium while you’re out and follow the instructions to crackle paint directly on your raw polymer clay.

You can find some examples of the use of different paints on this post by Jan Geisen.

For more tutorials online:

  • One of the things I didn’t show you in the samples above was how to use impression material to create a faux crackle effect. I use crumpled aluminum foil for this and then use the antiquing approach of rubbing acrylic paint into the cracks after its cured and wiping it off. But Katie Oskin has an interesting material to share in this online tutorial, as well as showing the effect of painting it before she impresses it.
  • In this video tutorial, Sandy Huntress shows you how to crackle very thin sheets of partially cured polymer clay.
  • Crackling can be done on round surfaces too! Here’s an online tutorial using metal leaf on bicone beads to create crackle. Keep in mind you could do the same thing by painting the beads and then rolling them around to get it crack.

Do you know of other great crackle tutorials or want to point out another crackling technique I didn’t mention? Drop a comment below (if you’re on this post’s page online) or click on the title of this post to go to the post’s page and share the info with us all. It would be much appreciated!

 

Bits of News

 

Okay… Off with me. Working on the next issue of The Polymer Studio. Get your subscription or catch up if you didn’t get the first issue by just jumping over to the website now.

Know that your purchases and subscriptions help me pay the bills so I can justify the time I put into sharing all the good stuff on this blog. Help me help you as we collectively feed our addiction to polymer!

Have a wonderful and creative week! –Sage

 

Painted Parts

February 23, 2018

Today, I would like to bring up the subject of painting polymer. Although the attitude is changing, there is still some unwritten rule out there that you really shouldn’t have to paint polymer because all the colors and possible inclusions to create variations in color and texture are already in, or can be added, to the clay. But like any material, the way polymer presents color and inclusions is quite a bit different from the way other materials will do it. And sometimes it’s a lot harder to accomplish. This is art, not some kind of skill challenge, at least not for a lot of us. I am all for challenging our skills and seeing how far we can push the clay but sometimes, you just want to have at it with some form of pigment that you can spontaneously and freely brush, dab, draw or drop onto the clay.

Take these beauties, for instance. It looks like, from the edge of the treated clay sheet in the back, that Leanne Fergeus did a bit of splashing about, in a rather linear manner, with maybe some alcohol inks on a sheet of pale colored clay.  Then she dashed either metallic inks (I got myself a selection of these from Poly Clay Play but have yet to play with them!) or metallic acrylics. And the effect is just stunning. Very painterly, kind of sunset-like but mostly it’s just a great energized and confident-feeling color palette and texture. And you could not achieve this kind of look with clay alone. The clay allows for shaping the painted surface and so is integral, just not its inherent color.

Leanne is partial to alcohol inks and does lovely loose work with them on, primarily, simply shaped pendants. You can see more of her work on Instagram and on her website.

The Complexity of Time

November 29, 2017

In my search for clock inspiration, I veered a bit off the polymer path, but then again, I kept running into pieces that I thought were polymer but were not. Of course, pieces like this splendid celestial clock by Natalya Polekh could be created in a very similar fashion with polymer. Large textured sheets and fun with alcohol inks and mica powders could produce similarly stunning results so I took a  closer look.

Natalya looks to be a well-known mixed media artist in Eastern Europe and Russia and when I say mixed, I mean all kinds of things. Her primary materials look to be various types of acrylic paint, dimensional and pearling paints, 3D gel, embossing paste, and glass and metal accents of different types. She works in texture, mosaics and layered media that is applied in such a way that knowing the materials is rather superfluous. She creates a beautiful complexity of texture and motif with shine and shimmer applied in abundance but always in a tasteful and often intriguing manner.

She does much more than clocks although she has done quite few of them. Take a look at her shop for more clock and textural ideas as well as very well priced tutorials on how she creates this work.  Her VK.com page has more images.

 

Fall Glass

November 4, 2016

sabine-spiesser-glass-shardsHere is a little more autumn color for the week. I think this is a brooch although it doesn’t say. I did have something else in mind from the ever-exploring Sabine Spiesser but then I alighted upon this little experiment while enjoying her Flickr photos and a couple of things about it caught my eye.

I find this interesting not only because it’s a faux textured glass technique and yummy colors but also because of a comment Sabine made in regards to it:

“Unfortunately I noticed that alcohol inks fade in bright light in Pardo clay. I left an old piece in a bright spot where it gets some sunshine and after about 4 months all colours except for red were gone. That was quite a shock. I have to rethink what I am doing.”

It makes me wonder if this is just a problem with Pardo, or all translucents or alcohol inks in general. I’m going to do some research and then my own tests. I’ll post my results in our newsletter, where all such tips usually land in my world. If you aren’t on our twice monthly newsletter list, you’re missing out on tips, community news, first sales announcements, and some of our magazine news. You can sign up on the left hand side of our website’s home page. In the meantime, enjoy a view of Sabine’s work on her Flickr pages and website.

 

Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Try something different with a faux technique you like to do. If it’s faux stone, create forms you don’t usually see them in or texture them in a way that would be near impossible in a real stone. If it’s metal, create something organic-looking, like a silver flower or a copper pod. Just because we can mimic nature’s material doesn’t mean we need to recreate it only in the forms that nature presents it. Let go and try something different.

_________________________________________

Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners.

Shades of Clay Sept 15 Blog   never knead -july-2015c-125   The Great Create Sept 15 blog   businesscard-3.5inx2in-h-front

_________________________________________

Alcohol Primaries

March 11, 2015

montarsi extruder pearl testI think the brightest article we had in the spring 2015 issue had to be Jan Montarsi’s “Expanding Your Color Range with Alcohol Inks”. In this article, Jan not only shows us the best way to use alcohol ink as a colorant for the clay, but also gives us recipes and insights into developing a pearl and translucent clay color range far beyond what is available straight out of the package. Additionally, he offered a great Skinner blend style technique for creating graduated colors with alcohol inks. He has based his newest color expansion on a set of alcohol inks he has been able to determine will work as wonderful primaries for color mixing. It’s an intensely packed article that color junkies really need to get their hands on.

If you have been watching Jan throughout the last four plus years, you’ve seen the intense and gorgeous pearl colors he creates and combines within his various techniques. Because of everything Jan stuffed into this article, we didn’t have room for a show of his work using this coloring approach, so I thought I’d share a bit more of his range today. This necklace was a test using extruded pearl clays. I wish my tests turned out this luscious. This is not even a recent example of where he has gone with his coloring and pearl techniques, but it is a beautiful show of just what can be done by mixing a wider range of pearl colors together.

To see the wider range of Jan’s work, take some time and visit his Flickr photostream. Then be sure to read the article and set aside some exploration time with alcohol inks!

 

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.

  tpa-blog-125x125-2015 LP-PA-FoilsDf0215   ice cream ad  TPA_McGuire_blog ad;

Vintaj Patina Time

January 14, 2015

Who here likes mokume and also likes working with inks? I bet I’d see a lot of hands raised if I could actually see you all. This link will send you to a kind of exploration, that doubles as a tutorial, on working with Vintaj inks with a mokume technique. Vintaj is an opaque ink created to be used with metals, but Amy Crawley decided to try it out with polymer.

What I’m getting from her experiments is that this is a good alternative for opaque color layers. We already have metallic foils and gilder’s paste, and you can use oil paints or alcohol inks for varying levels of transparency, but we don’t have any good opaque options. Acrylic paints, because they become a stretchy plastic when dried, stretches when cut, so it makes a rather funky color layer that can also pull your layers apart when cutting. Trust me, I tried, and it was a mess. But the Vintaj ink doesn’t stretch. It will crack, though, which is actually kind of cool.

So I thought I’d share this with you all as an alternative idea for mokume layers. It made me think that maybe tempura paints would work in a similar manner — crackling, not stretching, when manipulated and cut. In any case, if you are up for exploring mokume layer options, this set of three blog entries and her results may get you thinking and get you playing.

Her original experiments with Vintaj just on the surface of clay is the first post Amy write on Vintaj. Then go here for the first half of her mokume and Vintaj process, and here for the final steps.

 

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.

businesscard-3.5inx2in-h-front    PolymerArts Kaleidoscope     sfxpaad

DIY Alcohol Ink

So after a week of talking about alcohol inks, have you found yourself diving in and trying a few ideas you saw? And now, are there any alcohol ink colors you wish you had, but haven’t been able to find or don’t want to buy a pack of 3 or 9 just to get them? Do you find them expensive or hard to find? Well, we do have an option–making our own!

The things you need to make your own alcohol inks are a permanent dye color source and rubbing alcohol. There are two primary color sources available to pretty much everyone–home fabric dyes such as Rit, or permanent markers like Sharpies. I haven’t tried either, but I have heard that the ones made with Sharpies are very, well, pungent. That chemical marker smell will fill the air. Not sure that’s a good thing, but if you have  lot of permanent markers you don’t really use, it would be a way to give them a purpose.  However, from the research I’ve done, it seems that the Sharpie colors are more vibrant than those made with the fabric dyes when using them on polymer clay. Which was a little surprising. Not surprising is that the colors are more vibrant on paper than on polymer. But as I haven’t tried it (yet!) myself, I can only offer the online instructions I found that seemed most useful and let you decide.

This video uses the permanent marker method:

7468612_f520Here is a page on creating alcohol inks with markers if you aren’t into watching videos.

As for alcohol inks with fabric dyes, here is the best of them that I found. It’s a short video by Cindy Lietz of Polymer Clay Tutor, so it’s definitely geared towards polymer clay use.

You may also find some instruction about making alcohol ink with food coloring or Kool-aid, but keep in mind that the color needs to adhere to polymer. Most food dyes  cling to proteins but will not stain–certainly not in any permanent fashion–synthetic materials like plastics. So you need permanent dyes that will become permanent on synthetics and non-porous surfaces.

So as far as I know, permanent markers and fabric dyes are your best bet for easy to find alcohol colorants. And they’re cheap. That is always a plus!

Crackly Goodness

December 29, 2012

I couldn’t let the last days of the year go by without stopping to admire a little crackle. These sumptuous discs here are the work of Barbara Fajardo. She developed a technique that layers alcohol inks to get a multi-dimensional texture with, of course, lots of fine crackle.

deepseanecker

In this case, the polymer is a carrier rather than visual element, but even without knowing the particulars of Barbara’s technique, it’s unlikely that there is another material that could be paired with the inks and manipulated so as to develop the light crackling effect. These are some of the most magical aspects of our medium–the plasticity and ability of polymer to take on a wide variety of other mediums.

Even though color is what often draws us to polymer, it’s the physical characteristics of the material that make it so versatile. One of these days I’m going to count how many ways we can use it just for crackling.

In the meantime, we hope Barbara has the opportunity to develop a class for CraftArtEdu on this beautiful technique. She has four other classes available there right now. If you want to see more applications of Barbara’s crackly goodness, take some time to look through her Flickr page.

 

All It’s Cracked Up To Be

March 17, 2019
Posted in

What is it about weathered and worn surfaces that so many people find attractive these days? Mind you, I am very much one of them. I have a whole line of work called “Beautiful Decay” that explores the beauty I find in the deterioration of durable materials. But the one related effect that seems to be everywhere these days is crackling. Who doesn’t love a good crackle! From shabby chic furniture to crazed ceramics to crackle glass decor, the look of a deteriorating surface seems to have wide-ranging appeal.

Knowing that, it’s not really a surprise that crackle is so popular as a polymer technique. A great many of us are already texture fiends and, if you love texture then you are going to try crackle- so there’s one of the reasons for its popularity in polymer. But we also know that there is a market for work with crackled surfaces since it pops up in so many areas related to decoration and adornment, making it a safe bet if you sell your work.

There is no one right or best way to create a crackled surface in polymer. You may not have realized it, but there are literally dozens of ways to create crackle. It can be created with a crackle paint medium, partially cured layers of polymer (like I show you in my Controlled Crackle technique which you can find in your Fall 2011 edition of The Polymer Arts), dried paint (or glaze or gilders’ paste or floor wax) on raw clay, metal leaf on raw clay, leaching, alcohol treatments, or by creating a faux texture with impressed materials. And I know I am still missing a few in that list!

So, let’s enjoy some crackle work today and wrap up with a few tutorials on different crackle techniques that you can try out.

 

Let’s Get Cracking

One of my personal favorite “cracklers” is Staci Louise Smith. She uses a number of different techniques to achieve a wide range of cracked texture. In the necklace below, her crackle is not subtle. It is not evenly spread across her beads either but rather, it is rough and tumble and scattered in energetic horizontal lines. Her soft coloring calms the chaos of the crackle which is also balanced out by the many other purposeful accents and lines from the wire.

Staci can also do subtle as evidenced by the opening piece, a Balance Bowl from her tutorial in the Polymer Art Projects – Organic book. (You can get the book on our website if you want to make one of these stunning bowls.)

Check out this blog post where she shares how she makes the necklace here along with sketches and her thoughts on the process.

 

A subtle crackle can often take a bit more patience but what a lovely effect it can have. It may not even be obvious at first that the beads on this necklace below by Ursa Polak have a crackle surface, but the weathered feel comes across immediately. Take a close look to see all the fine-lined cracks that add to the depth and variation of the surface.

 

Kroma Crackle is a lovely gel medium that itself dries and cracks without having to stretch the clay and yet remains flexible so that you can manipulate the clay without the cracked material popping off. Once you worked with it for a bit you can control the size of the crackle pretty well. You can add small amounts of acrylic paint or mica powders to give yourself a wide variety of color options. You can also apply paints, inks, dyes and other colorants on it after its dry.

These earrings are by Els van Haasen uses Kroma Crackle on polymer. You can see how regular a crackle you can get with this medium. But it can definitely be quite varied once you come to understand how to use it.

 

You almost forget that the technique that was most commonly used by the highly esteemed Elise Winters, who we lost just this year, was also a crackle technique. Her work was very controlled, as was crackle but that was probably the most recognizable part about her signature style. I can only imagine the work she put into gaining such control over her crackle, but it just shows what can be done when we invest a bit of patience into our work. (I erroneously put in that this was metal leaf when I first posted but, no, it’s paint, which also takes such skilled control, having to ensure that the paint is evenly applied to get such fine crackle.)

 

This is actually a piece of mine from some years back. It includes alcohol treated raw clay, controlled cracking of partially cured clay, and metal leaf colored with alcohol ink. The alcohol treatment is a way of drying out the surface of raw clay to get a very fine crazing. It’s a bit of a tricky technique but it sure worked here. That helped create the uneven surface of the partially cured polymer under the metal leaf, giving it a burning ember look.

 

Let’s Crack You Up

Ready to try some various cracking techniques? Here are a few freebies to get you going:

If you want to try the straightforward Paint Crackle Techniques:

  • Grab a craft acrylic (the cheap acrylics work better than artist tube acrylics which tend to stretch rather than crack) or tempera paint and a well-conditioned sheet of polymer rolled on the thickest setting of your pasta machine.
  • Brush a moderate (not heavy) layer of the paint onto the polymer. Wait for it to completely dry.
  • Then roll it through the pasta machine set at two settings down from the thickness you created the sheet on. You can stop here or, for wider, more varied crackle, turn the sheet 90°, adjust the pasta machine down another one or two settings and run it through again.
  • You should have a nice crackle now but if your paint is stretching rather than cracking, rolling another sheet of polymer and lay the crackle sheet on top and then start rolling it through the pasta machine again. Eventually, the paint will crack but sometimes you need a really thick layer of polymer to start in order to stretch it far enough. Tempera paint won’t stretch and cracks very nicely if you have that on hand or fancy a run to your local craft store. You could also get some crackle medium while you’re out and follow the instructions to crackle paint directly on your raw polymer clay.

You can find some examples of the use of different paints on this post by Jan Geisen.

For more tutorials online:

  • One of the things I didn’t show you in the samples above was how to use impression material to create a faux crackle effect. I use crumpled aluminum foil for this and then use the antiquing approach of rubbing acrylic paint into the cracks after its cured and wiping it off. But Katie Oskin has an interesting material to share in this online tutorial, as well as showing the effect of painting it before she impresses it.
  • In this video tutorial, Sandy Huntress shows you how to crackle very thin sheets of partially cured polymer clay.
  • Crackling can be done on round surfaces too! Here’s an online tutorial using metal leaf on bicone beads to create crackle. Keep in mind you could do the same thing by painting the beads and then rolling them around to get it crack.

Do you know of other great crackle tutorials or want to point out another crackling technique I didn’t mention? Drop a comment below (if you’re on this post’s page online) or click on the title of this post to go to the post’s page and share the info with us all. It would be much appreciated!

 

Bits of News

 

Okay… Off with me. Working on the next issue of The Polymer Studio. Get your subscription or catch up if you didn’t get the first issue by just jumping over to the website now.

Know that your purchases and subscriptions help me pay the bills so I can justify the time I put into sharing all the good stuff on this blog. Help me help you as we collectively feed our addiction to polymer!

Have a wonderful and creative week! –Sage

 

Read More

Painted Parts

February 23, 2018
Posted in

Today, I would like to bring up the subject of painting polymer. Although the attitude is changing, there is still some unwritten rule out there that you really shouldn’t have to paint polymer because all the colors and possible inclusions to create variations in color and texture are already in, or can be added, to the clay. But like any material, the way polymer presents color and inclusions is quite a bit different from the way other materials will do it. And sometimes it’s a lot harder to accomplish. This is art, not some kind of skill challenge, at least not for a lot of us. I am all for challenging our skills and seeing how far we can push the clay but sometimes, you just want to have at it with some form of pigment that you can spontaneously and freely brush, dab, draw or drop onto the clay.

Take these beauties, for instance. It looks like, from the edge of the treated clay sheet in the back, that Leanne Fergeus did a bit of splashing about, in a rather linear manner, with maybe some alcohol inks on a sheet of pale colored clay.  Then she dashed either metallic inks (I got myself a selection of these from Poly Clay Play but have yet to play with them!) or metallic acrylics. And the effect is just stunning. Very painterly, kind of sunset-like but mostly it’s just a great energized and confident-feeling color palette and texture. And you could not achieve this kind of look with clay alone. The clay allows for shaping the painted surface and so is integral, just not its inherent color.

Leanne is partial to alcohol inks and does lovely loose work with them on, primarily, simply shaped pendants. You can see more of her work on Instagram and on her website.

Read More

The Complexity of Time

November 29, 2017
Posted in

In my search for clock inspiration, I veered a bit off the polymer path, but then again, I kept running into pieces that I thought were polymer but were not. Of course, pieces like this splendid celestial clock by Natalya Polekh could be created in a very similar fashion with polymer. Large textured sheets and fun with alcohol inks and mica powders could produce similarly stunning results so I took a  closer look.

Natalya looks to be a well-known mixed media artist in Eastern Europe and Russia and when I say mixed, I mean all kinds of things. Her primary materials look to be various types of acrylic paint, dimensional and pearling paints, 3D gel, embossing paste, and glass and metal accents of different types. She works in texture, mosaics and layered media that is applied in such a way that knowing the materials is rather superfluous. She creates a beautiful complexity of texture and motif with shine and shimmer applied in abundance but always in a tasteful and often intriguing manner.

She does much more than clocks although she has done quite few of them. Take a look at her shop for more clock and textural ideas as well as very well priced tutorials on how she creates this work.  Her VK.com page has more images.

 

Read More

Fall Glass

November 4, 2016
Posted in

sabine-spiesser-glass-shardsHere is a little more autumn color for the week. I think this is a brooch although it doesn’t say. I did have something else in mind from the ever-exploring Sabine Spiesser but then I alighted upon this little experiment while enjoying her Flickr photos and a couple of things about it caught my eye.

I find this interesting not only because it’s a faux textured glass technique and yummy colors but also because of a comment Sabine made in regards to it:

“Unfortunately I noticed that alcohol inks fade in bright light in Pardo clay. I left an old piece in a bright spot where it gets some sunshine and after about 4 months all colours except for red were gone. That was quite a shock. I have to rethink what I am doing.”

It makes me wonder if this is just a problem with Pardo, or all translucents or alcohol inks in general. I’m going to do some research and then my own tests. I’ll post my results in our newsletter, where all such tips usually land in my world. If you aren’t on our twice monthly newsletter list, you’re missing out on tips, community news, first sales announcements, and some of our magazine news. You can sign up on the left hand side of our website’s home page. In the meantime, enjoy a view of Sabine’s work on her Flickr pages and website.

 

Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Try something different with a faux technique you like to do. If it’s faux stone, create forms you don’t usually see them in or texture them in a way that would be near impossible in a real stone. If it’s metal, create something organic-looking, like a silver flower or a copper pod. Just because we can mimic nature’s material doesn’t mean we need to recreate it only in the forms that nature presents it. Let go and try something different.

_________________________________________

Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners.

Shades of Clay Sept 15 Blog   never knead -july-2015c-125   The Great Create Sept 15 blog   businesscard-3.5inx2in-h-front

_________________________________________

Read More

Alcohol Primaries

March 11, 2015
Posted in

montarsi extruder pearl testI think the brightest article we had in the spring 2015 issue had to be Jan Montarsi’s “Expanding Your Color Range with Alcohol Inks”. In this article, Jan not only shows us the best way to use alcohol ink as a colorant for the clay, but also gives us recipes and insights into developing a pearl and translucent clay color range far beyond what is available straight out of the package. Additionally, he offered a great Skinner blend style technique for creating graduated colors with alcohol inks. He has based his newest color expansion on a set of alcohol inks he has been able to determine will work as wonderful primaries for color mixing. It’s an intensely packed article that color junkies really need to get their hands on.

If you have been watching Jan throughout the last four plus years, you’ve seen the intense and gorgeous pearl colors he creates and combines within his various techniques. Because of everything Jan stuffed into this article, we didn’t have room for a show of his work using this coloring approach, so I thought I’d share a bit more of his range today. This necklace was a test using extruded pearl clays. I wish my tests turned out this luscious. This is not even a recent example of where he has gone with his coloring and pearl techniques, but it is a beautiful show of just what can be done by mixing a wider range of pearl colors together.

To see the wider range of Jan’s work, take some time and visit his Flickr photostream. Then be sure to read the article and set aside some exploration time with alcohol inks!

 

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.

  tpa-blog-125x125-2015 LP-PA-FoilsDf0215   ice cream ad  TPA_McGuire_blog ad;

Read More

Vintaj Patina Time

January 14, 2015
Posted in

Who here likes mokume and also likes working with inks? I bet I’d see a lot of hands raised if I could actually see you all. This link will send you to a kind of exploration, that doubles as a tutorial, on working with Vintaj inks with a mokume technique. Vintaj is an opaque ink created to be used with metals, but Amy Crawley decided to try it out with polymer.

What I’m getting from her experiments is that this is a good alternative for opaque color layers. We already have metallic foils and gilder’s paste, and you can use oil paints or alcohol inks for varying levels of transparency, but we don’t have any good opaque options. Acrylic paints, because they become a stretchy plastic when dried, stretches when cut, so it makes a rather funky color layer that can also pull your layers apart when cutting. Trust me, I tried, and it was a mess. But the Vintaj ink doesn’t stretch. It will crack, though, which is actually kind of cool.

So I thought I’d share this with you all as an alternative idea for mokume layers. It made me think that maybe tempura paints would work in a similar manner — crackling, not stretching, when manipulated and cut. In any case, if you are up for exploring mokume layer options, this set of three blog entries and her results may get you thinking and get you playing.

Her original experiments with Vintaj just on the surface of clay is the first post Amy write on Vintaj. Then go here for the first half of her mokume and Vintaj process, and here for the final steps.

 

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DIY Alcohol Ink

November 24, 2013
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So after a week of talking about alcohol inks, have you found yourself diving in and trying a few ideas you saw? And now, are there any alcohol ink colors you wish you had, but haven’t been able to find or don’t want to buy a pack of 3 or 9 just to get them? Do you find them expensive or hard to find? Well, we do have an option–making our own!

The things you need to make your own alcohol inks are a permanent dye color source and rubbing alcohol. There are two primary color sources available to pretty much everyone–home fabric dyes such as Rit, or permanent markers like Sharpies. I haven’t tried either, but I have heard that the ones made with Sharpies are very, well, pungent. That chemical marker smell will fill the air. Not sure that’s a good thing, but if you have  lot of permanent markers you don’t really use, it would be a way to give them a purpose.  However, from the research I’ve done, it seems that the Sharpie colors are more vibrant than those made with the fabric dyes when using them on polymer clay. Which was a little surprising. Not surprising is that the colors are more vibrant on paper than on polymer. But as I haven’t tried it (yet!) myself, I can only offer the online instructions I found that seemed most useful and let you decide.

This video uses the permanent marker method:

7468612_f520Here is a page on creating alcohol inks with markers if you aren’t into watching videos.

As for alcohol inks with fabric dyes, here is the best of them that I found. It’s a short video by Cindy Lietz of Polymer Clay Tutor, so it’s definitely geared towards polymer clay use.

You may also find some instruction about making alcohol ink with food coloring or Kool-aid, but keep in mind that the color needs to adhere to polymer. Most food dyes  cling to proteins but will not stain–certainly not in any permanent fashion–synthetic materials like plastics. So you need permanent dyes that will become permanent on synthetics and non-porous surfaces.

So as far as I know, permanent markers and fabric dyes are your best bet for easy to find alcohol colorants. And they’re cheap. That is always a plus!

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Crackly Goodness

December 29, 2012
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I couldn’t let the last days of the year go by without stopping to admire a little crackle. These sumptuous discs here are the work of Barbara Fajardo. She developed a technique that layers alcohol inks to get a multi-dimensional texture with, of course, lots of fine crackle.

deepseanecker

In this case, the polymer is a carrier rather than visual element, but even without knowing the particulars of Barbara’s technique, it’s unlikely that there is another material that could be paired with the inks and manipulated so as to develop the light crackling effect. These are some of the most magical aspects of our medium–the plasticity and ability of polymer to take on a wide variety of other mediums.

Even though color is what often draws us to polymer, it’s the physical characteristics of the material that make it so versatile. One of these days I’m going to count how many ways we can use it just for crackling.

In the meantime, we hope Barbara has the opportunity to develop a class for CraftArtEdu on this beautiful technique. She has four other classes available there right now. If you want to see more applications of Barbara’s crackly goodness, take some time to look through her Flickr page.

 

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