Vibrant Caning
January 13, 2015
Inspirational Art
This tutorial caught my eye, I have to admit, because of all the vibrant color. It’s also a nice form that undulates, not unlike those glowing bullseye canes that make the center of the outside slices.
The tutorial and the finished set you see here were created by Karina Formanova and include a number of simple yet effectively combined canes, as well as a how-to on creating the form and building up the layers it needs. Although you are supposedly just learning to create a bracelet, you learn some further composite caning, forming, finishing and color combining. So, really, it’s a pretty full little tutorial when it comes down to it.
You can find the full tutorial on Karina’s LiveMaster pages. Also, drop by her page of buttons and other fun bits also there on LiveMaster for other fun ideas and color combinations.
Color Indulgence
December 15, 2014
Inspirational Art
Do you ever have those days when you just want to sit down with a box of chocolates, a bag of pastries or a giant pizza with everything on it and just enjoy a little over-indulgence? Of course you do! I’m kind of feeling that way this week, but more about color than candy. Actually, I’ve had enough candy and pastries (gets rough on that account this time of year, doesn’t it?), but bright, saturated painterly color, I have not had enough of lately. So this week, let’s just indulge. We all have enough going on with holiday plans, shopping, selling, making trips to the post office and such. Let’s not get too serious and just enjoy some pretty things.
A quick jolt to the system came across my screen the other day in the form of this incredibly bright and mesmerizing bracelet by Viviane Depasse. She created this during a class with Carol Simmons this past April. Why is that not so surprising? This presentation does not have Carol’s precision kaleidoscope arrangements, but I, myself, am very much enjoying the meandering color. It is like the epitome of the phrase “eye candy”. It is bordering on overly-bright, but like really sweet candy you keep eating anyway; it’s hard not to keep looking.
Viviane posts her work both from classes and independent exploration, as well as her thoughts on her blog Mon Jardin Merveilloeufs.
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Framed Opportunity
December 9, 2014
Inspirational Art
I think we are all rather familiar with the idea of a decorative frame. We’ve seen them on old paintings, antique mirrors and even around windows and doors. Frames can be a work of art unto themselves. So when framing your own work, why not go ahead and consider pushing the decorative aspect just as you might with your bails, clasps, spacer beads or any other element added to your work? Just how far can you take it?
Well, one possible answer as to how far you can take decorative framing can be found in the work of Julie Eakes, who is the featured artist in Maggie Maggio’s “Color Spotlight” section of our winter issue. These highly-detailed and deeply, layered frames may not fit a lot of work since the business of the frames would compete with the image it is surrounding, but in a case like this, it rather matches. Julie is best know for her face cane and pointillism, so the images she frames are the strongest types of images we are drawn to (we gravitate to faces before any other easily, recognized imagery), and her canes are quite complex, so the frames work with these images rather than drown them out.
How far could you take your frames so that they work with what you are framing? Or could fun with complex frames push you to create more complex images? You can read more about why and how Julie creates these canes and frames in the article and read more about her work on her blog.
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Shift and Illustrated
November 5, 2014
Inspirational Art
Here are a couple interesting examples of creating depth using polymer. I thought it was particularly interesting that they are the same forms created by the same artist, who obviously has some interest in the subject.
On the left we have some seriously mashed mica shift with a great organic look, while on the right we have a pure illustration created with a shadow cane. I love some dramatic mica shift, but I have to say the shadow cane is the the one that really draws you in. Take a closer look at Jeanette Kandray’s cane on her Flickr page. Those paving stone-like formations seem to get deeper the more you look at them. Well, maybe a lack of sleep helps with the illusion, but I’m sure well rested, it’s still pretty impressive.
Speaking of sleep deprivation, I’m going to get back to my never ending To Do list in hopes of getting some sleep tonight. I’ll leave you to ogle these and the many other projects on Jeanette’s Flickr photostream and her website. And if you like that cane, lucky us … Jeanette has a tutorial of it available on her Etsy site.
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Mirror, mirror …
September 29, 2014
Inspirational Art
The ‘mirror image’ is a very common element in nature; from leaves to flowers to fruit to every creature I can think of, there are often two halves mirroring each other to make the whole. I’ve seen a number of interesting uses of this in polymer pieces lately and thought this might be an easy theme to gather up work for this week. Not so much, however. Because using this kind of element necessitates a centered composition where the mirror images appear–their meeting point in the middle creating a center line–and with a community much enamored of asymmetry, it is far rarer than I would have thought. But, I aim to find a variety of examples where the mirroring adds energy or depth to a piece rather than feeling stale because the element (or elements) are arranged on some center line.
The obvious first place to look is in caning. The kaleidoscope cane alone holds up a great argument for mirroring. Create an pie slice shaped cane, cut up the length and lay matching sides together to fill in the pie round (or some approach akin to that.) And you end up with usually very energized visuals. Lines, curves, angles and other directional elements will be moving from the center in opposite directions creating that energy.
When I hear kaleidoscope canes, I always think of Carol Simmons and her intense precision in this art form. These pendants are examples for her upcoming workshops being held in Racine, Wisconsin after the RAM Symposium later in October. (It’s a waiting list only class; find out more on her website.) The center lines from the process of mirroring images have become a range of star burst like patterns, pushing direction from the center of the pendants to the outside that adds dynamic energy and a mesmerizing amount of detail on such a small space.
If you haven’t attempted a kaleidoscope cane before, but are interested, there are dozens of basic free tutorials as well as more intricate ones sold on Etsy and through other shops. Just Google the term “kaleidoscope cane tutorial” for many instant options.
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More Fun with Extruders
September 13, 2014
Inspirational Art
So after a week of extruder contemplation, have you gone into the studio to try out some new ideas yourself? Well, if not, but you’re anxious to try something out, here are a few ideas for you.
A shaped cane with no background fill? Is that possible? According to Lilu of Russia, you can do this with an extruder. How is that possible? Even our brave artist here can’t say how this works, but can show us successful results. The caveat is that you lose about half your clay to scraps as the ends come out mangled. But, with so many scrap cane techniques to put those towards, that might not be the worse thing to happen.
For those of you who want something more straightforward and less experimental, try these extruded snake surface designs with graduated colors created by Lucy Struncova. No real mysteries here … just extrude small snakes in graduated colors (if you’ve not done that before, go here for the classic tutorial on creating rainbow snakes with an extruder), lay them side by side, use the edge of a credit card, or long thin needle tool to impress the lines perpendicular to the snakes and cut out shapes as desired. A quick easy way to get a surface design with a range of colors and complex looking texture.
Or, you can do both! Roll your scrap ends from the background-less extruded cane through the pasta machine, punch a stack of discs to put back into the extruder, extrude snakes to your heart’s content and make Lucy’s snake and line textured sheets. Then accent them with cane slices. Don’t you love how versatile polymer can be? Even using the same stack of clay through several techniques.
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Outside Inspiration: Lines of Paper
September 12, 2014
Inspirational Art
Reader Corine Lindhorst was kind enough to write and share the work of this highly talented paper artist whose work you see here. Although it’s not extruded, the use of long strips of paper is not unlike using long snakes of extruded clay to form patterns and images. The images in the case of these paper illustrations by Yulia Brodskaya are incredibly fluid and capture nuances that some pencil and paint artists with their limitless color and texture options can’t always accomplish.
Yulia started working as a graphic designer and illustrator until realizing her passion was in paper. Now, she says she “draws with paper instead of on it.” And very, very successfully I might add. In just the 8 years since she started experimenting in paper illustration, she has amassed a large list of huge clients from Starbucks to Godiva, Target, Sephora and The New York Times Magazine. This is one of her more colorful and fun pieces, but may not be the most amazing of them. Her portraiture has some amazingly emotional eyes and facial expressions, especially considering the limitations of the medium. Or are they limitations?
Okay, you clay extruder illustrators … get to it. There is a market for you and one with deep pockets if you’re up for the challenge!
Take a closer look at Yulila’s work on her website but for a quick and powerful overview, take a look at this post on the “This is Colossal” blog.
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.
Extruded Moonlight
September 11, 2014
Inspirational Art
Claire Fairweather, herself, sent this along when she saw we were doing an extruded themed week. In her words: “‘Extruded Light’ is a candle bowl, approximately 6-inches in diameter. I made it by winding extruded, translucent Premo polymer clay around a spherical glass bowl. It looks great with a color changing LED candle in it, but is difficult to photograph. The white candle light, in this photograph, shows the extruded strings the best.”
I know how you all love translucent clay applications, so it would have been hard not to share this. The idea is pretty simple, but the wrapped strings add a calm horizontal texture. My editorial assistant, Paula Gilbert, is here with me for the opening of The Great Create at which I am doing demos (tonight in Denver!) and teaching a class on Saturday. Paula saw this bowl and said that looks like a glowing moon. And, so it does. I wish I had time to ask Claire how she got the craters in it or if they were incidental. Happy, unintended element if so.
Claire creates award-winning polymer work and writes her blog from New Zealand.
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.
Woven Vessel
September 9, 2014
Inspirational Art
The popularity of the extruded cane has led to some wonderful experimentation using the reveal options provided by the nature of the cane. Laying these canes sideways gives you a series of layers to dig down into and expose.
This particular vessel created by Germany’s Vera Kleist Thom has these canes laid out in a weave pattern, but the shaving down of the outer layers gives it a kind of worn stone appearance. So, do we have woven stone? Intriguing. The combination makes for a beautiful, calm visual texture. The colors follow this calm theme by being primarily neutral, but there are a few rich reds and brilliant, ocean blues that accent the weave.
Give yourself a treat and look at the other vessels and jewelry she has created using this technique on her Flickr page. Just beautiful, contemporary pieces.
Carving out and revealing layers is nothing new for Vera, and right now, you can get some of her amazing cut-in bead necklaces and loose beads that we featured here in November of 2013 from her Etsy shop.
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One of the last places we visited on my whirlwind trip through Europe was Sweden. It was actually very brief, only half a day as part of a train tour around the coast between Denmark and Sweden, but what a lovely country and what lovely people. This did not surprise me, as my idea of these people primarily comes from getting to know Sweden’s Eva Marie Tornstrom over these last few years. She is a darling and impassioned woman as most anyone could surmise from just seeing the emotional and openly honest work in her sculptures.
I have been watching Eva Marie’s work just bloom for the last several years. Her newest pieces have included some surprise elements, in particular, these zipper-back horses. The surface of the horses are richly textured and with matte colors and cane flowers, and then within the zipper framework, there is this contrast of crackled and shimmering gold. I can come up with several metaphors for what she’s done here but this work is created with so much room for your own personal connection, so I will leave it for you to fill in those blanks.
My favorite place to check in on Eva Marie is on her Instagram page where you can see the transformation of her work from one project to the next. But you can also get a closer look and more details about why she creates horses on her website.
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Can you believe it’s August already? More than halfway through the year! How have you been doing with your New Year’s resolutions? I have 2 out of 3 down pretty good. But like me, many of us have not been able to keep up with polymer challenges and studio goals and have had to adjust them. That’s okay. The real purpose of a challenge is to keep at it and see what you can discover if you push yourself. Just this week, I have finally been able to keep a steady studio schedule (a couple of hours every other day which is a 100% better than what I had managed at any time the first half of the year!)
Then there are amazing people like Wendy Jorre de St Jorre who have done this kind of thing at least a couple of years in a row. That’s dedication. Last year she did bangles and this year she’s been doing rings, one each week. She takes her amazing canes used for necklaces and bracelets as well as various decor items and works them into beautiful bands. Although some of the original canes distorts quite a bit as it is wrapped around the small domed band, because she has such great color sense and keeps an eye on the balance of contrasts, the abstract (and even not so abstract) results are just gorgeous.
To see what she has accomplished aside from this beautiful ring here, hop over to see Wendy’s adventures on her Flickr photostream.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Take an application usually used in a different kind of jewelry or decor and create a ring. Or if you do create a lot of rings, create something unusual like a hat pin or an ear cuff.
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Before I get into my little thoughts about today’s intriguing piece, I wanted to put out a couple of thoughts for all of you who are attempting to do the challenges. I’ve had some questions and concerns about getting them done. First of all, you don’t need to do all the challenges presented to gain insight and benefit from them. The goal is to push yourself to look at your work differently, to explore, and to see what there is to discover. A regular challenge will certainly help you do this because you would have committed to a particular goal. But you do not have to do 3 a week. Some people have the time to do so but certainly not all of us. Maybe just one a week, choosing whichever challenges I post that appeal to you most. Or take one night or one day a month and choose a couple to explore. Make your goal reasonable for you and your schedule. I can already tell you that three a week is really taxing me. I am barely managing the sketch suggestions and I have yet to take photos so I can share, but I do plan on doing it. If you thought you’d try to do them all and can’t, readjust your goal to something manageable.
Also, remember that these challenges do not require that you finish a piece each time. Being able to finish is extremely important and that is where sharing on the Flickr page can be a motivator. But maybe you do one challenge a week and aim to have one completed piece to share come the end of the month. Do what works for you and, please, do not give yourself a hard time if you are not able to keep the goal you set. Readjust and just keep trying. Keep your personal end-goal in mind. Mine is to have more regular studio time and, although I haven’t completed anything yet, I have at least been at my work table a lot more than I had been. Those are small steps, but they’re important. As long as you are moving forward and not stalling or going backwards, those are accomplishments to be happy about.
Speaking of small things, do you see what small adjustments were probably made here to create this mermaid’s tail? I am guessing, from the look of Kim Detmers flowers petal canes, that these cane components started out floral but, somewhere along the way, they suggested fins to Kim. I chuckled at the form being just the tail of the mermaid. Did she shed this when granted a wish for human legs? Is this the mythical aquatic version of a rabbit’s foot worn for good luck? I don’t know but I liked the whimsy and the re-purposing of the canes, if that is what she did.
Kim is all about fancy and fantasy as you can see in her Etsy shop. And what is fantasy but re-envisioning our common world?
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: If you want to try a challenge today, how about taking a cane, a motif, a form, or some element that you regularly create with and try to imagine it as something else. A bead could be a dolls head with the addition of a body and a hat. A heart motif could be petals on a flower or cut in-half to become tear drops. I’m looking at my vine motif that I usually use vertically and I’m thinking I could set them horizontally to become stylized wind motifs. But that is just a first thought. Let’s see where I can go from there. How about you?
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This Friday I’d like to leave you with a little something to try out this weekend. I still have a myriad of examples showing the combination of dots and lines, and we may just pull out a few more for next week, but for now, how about we just have some fun? France’s Marie-Charlotte Chaillon shares this versatile tutorial for juxtaposing dots and lines in a piece of jewelry, although it could easily be transferred to home decor or other decorative art. I like that the ‘dots’ here aren’t your basic option. The cane that will make the stacked dots is rather nice on its own for accents or mosaic work. It looks rather like an interesting twist on the pixellated retro cane. The white seems to be key as the gradation gives it a bit of an inner glow. Any color palette that appeals to you would do, but the graphic nature does show off bright contrasts quite nicely.
Marie-Charlotte is pretty generous with the cane-centric tutorials, so if that is where your creative meanderings are on right now, head over to her blog or her Pinterest board specifically dedicated to her tutorials and have yourself a blast!
When talking ruffles, most likely fabric comes to mind first as a source for outside inspiration, but do you think of felt as a particularly ruffled fiber? Instead of flouncy and fluffy, felted ruffles offer substance and a more solid and open canvas for dramatic textures and colors.
This scarf shows some of the potential of using felt to create undulating edges. Felt has been making a bit of a come back in the fashion world and felt crafters are coming out big and bold with it. I thought this work by Irena Rudman would intrigue polymer artists as the composition of the work looked immediately to me like wonderful inspiration for leaf-shaped beads or the facing ends of a curious cuff bracelet.
There is something kind of Melanie West about this scarf. I can also see a thin polymer component with a center of slices taken from stacked circular extrusion canes or mokume surrounded by ruffled Skinner blends or mica dusted polymer. It got my wheels turning. Is it intriguing you?
Irena is really big on the ruffles in her work, which you can see in her Etsy shop. If you are just dying of curiosity as to how she accomplished this or simply have a budding interest in felting (which can and has often been combined with polymer pieces), Irena has a number of tutorials for scarves and collars in her shop, as well.
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First of all, I just realized this will be the last post of May. Really? This month is over? Wow … that went quick. Due to all the bedlam here, we’ve been just barely keeping up with the 3 blogs a week, and we have at least another week or so of chaos to get through. So, between that and all the notes from people who are liking the 3 days a week (“We have so much to read every day as it is …”), for now, we are going to keep this pace. Once we have the summer issue wrapped up next week, I’ll put together a survey (and some fun stuff to give away!) and give everyone who wants to offer their opinion, a chance to weigh in on the blog schedule.
In the meantime, my search for recent translucent clay work that uses the clay’s very particular characteristics in a new or surprising way was not as fruitful as I might have hoped. Have we gotten a bit tired of it? There are plenty of people using it to produce a wide variety of faux effects and mixing it with regular clays for better color and luminosity, but purely translucent for the sake of playing with its diaphanous quality seems to be the purview of just a handful of folks. However, in my search I ran across the pieces you see here. The first example I saw was the earrings you see in the upper left. I thought they were polymer, but then I got to the artist’s page and realized it had to be acrylic.
The artist is Jahyun Rita Baek, and this work is not new either, but something created when Rita was in art school in the United Kingdom. The series is called Cloud, which I believe is referring to the concept of light in both the illuminating quality and the perceived weight that are at play here. The work is beautifully simplistic and mesmerizing. Similar approaches with translucent polymer would be just as amazing, don’t you think?
So, this is the bit of inspiration I wanted to share with you today. Simple forms in floating and swirling designs could be created so easily with polymer. About the only thing this would take is knowing how to hold back and working clean–by which I mean clean clay and clean lines. If I could even get into my studio right now, I would go play for an hour just to relieve some stress. But parts of my office are in the way! So back to that.
Jump over to Rita’s website for more of her unusual work, not just in acrylic, but all kinds of materials from plastic to precious. And enjoy a beautiful spring weekend with a bit of creativity mixed in!
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We haven’t visited the wonderful world of transluscents in awhile, and I have been curious to see what people have been doing lately. Strangely, there is not a lot of recently posted work. Anyone have anything new they’d like to share? I’ll keep searching, but I’m up for some striking new work to be landing in my mailbox, too. Hint, hint.
In the meantime, here is a beautiful piece by Brazil’s Beatriz Cominatto that she created a few years back. It’s not a complex concept, this scale-like layering of cane slices, but it does show off the particular advantage of working with translucents. Instead of considering just the surface of the clay, translucents allow you to focus on the content of the depth of the clay. The layering offers another dimension to the design when translucents are in play, which allows for such criss-cross patterning and other ways to create lines that work in multiple ways.
Beatrice created this in 2012, if the Flickr date is correct. She did a lot of exploring in many different techniques then, so although there is not a lot of translucent, she did some great sushi canes with the translucent clay along with other polymer work. You can explore more of Beatrice’s work on her Flickr page and her website.
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A week of dramatic patterns would not be complete without a little Jon Anderson. You have likely seen at least a few of his larger, cane covered animals or maybe his bowls or even his guitars. But, have you seen his jewelry?
Jon’s fascination with canes is all about the pattern. The forms he covers are more of a canvas than the source of inspiration. Of course, animals and the spirit of them is where his finds a home for his patterns, but his canes come from what he has seen on his travels in other decorative artwork, as well as architecture and the decorative elements of buildings.
Jon has such an amazing eye for how to lay out the canes in a way that enhances the form. Also, his canes are so carefully created and reduced that he can bring them down to a size that can be applied onto forms as small as the pendants you see here. This means that many of us can afford to collect a few, even when our budgets are small.
Although Jon is American, he lives and creates in Bali with his wife who takes care of his promotions and PR. He also has an agent in the US who takes care of the sales and distribution of his work, so Jon gets to just focus on his art. Lucky, lucky guy.
You can read one of his only personal interviews in the Spring 2012 issue of The Polymer Arts and see more of his work on his website.
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Here’s another thought on that whole adding variation to repetition thing. Just as repetition doesn’t have to mean consistent and dull, variation doesn’t have to mean anything chaotic or crazy. The idea of variation is to give us something more to look at, to mix it up a little, to put enough interesting differences into a piece to either make a big initial impact, keep us looking at it, or to evoke a complexity of an emotion. Or, really, just because we find beauty in variation.
But varied can also be part of a series of consistently repeated elements. Center-focused compositions are often considered basic and boring. I probably rallied against that idea in art school more than anything else. What was this aversion to center-focus or balance? Nature is based heavily on this concept, and some of our most beautiful inspirations come from that kind of thing.
These pieces by Ivy Niles are an excellent example of variation in repetition using a centered composition. She uses more than one cane to give the eye a variety of visual textures plus those moderately used crystals to add a sparkle to the brilliant blues. I think we are averaging about five canes per piece plus accents, which could look quite busy, but the centric and regular repetition reins it all in. Just beautiful.
Ivy is a master cane maker with some of the most beautiful and intricate designs. She sells her canes on Etsy and shows off more of her goodies on her website as well.
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