BumpyTerrain
October 10, 2018 Inspirational Art
Take an already enticing, beautiful organic texture like crackle and literally “bump” it up with a wonderfully organic bumpy texture and you’ve got a real powerhouse of a textural combination.
That’s basically what Shelley Atwood did with these otherwise simply designed earrings. You really wouldn’t want to do a lot more with this as you would risk making this overly busy. The simple round shape and the round negative space reflect the roundness in the bumps but then the crackle comes in with an edgy and erratic energy that contrasts nicely with the predominate soft forms and shapes. The choice of color also brings additional energy to this organic terrain, the reds and yellows playing nicely with this contrasting combination of textures.
Shelley has been playing with dots and bumps and other heavily textured surface applications and techniques for quite a while now. Her Flickr photostream looks like a massive sampler of textural surface design possibilities in polymer. Pop over there or peruse her portfolio on her website for all kinds of textural inspiration.
Darling Passion
July 13, 2018 Inspirational Art
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.
100 Days of Clay
April 9, 2018 Inspirational Art
Ginger Davis Allman of The Blue Bottle Tree is doing a veneer day. A post of hers on Facebook alerted me to the #the100dayproject challenge she is doing these for and I figured that if Ginger, as busy as she gets, is doing this, then I should be able to as well so we busy women are getting even busier!
#the100dayproject is a general artistic challenge on Instagram to create one something each day for 100 days. The participant determines what they will do and with what medium, if they are even that specific. Some people are doing nothing but doodles while other people are creating completed pieces.
For instance, while Ginger is doing veneers in polymer, I am creating textural pieces and writing poetry to go with it (I’m posting these to my personal Instagram page, The Sage Arts.) The image here is Ginger’s Day 2 project. Her beautiful crackle is overlaid with silkscreen. It looks even cooler when you see it move as Ginger shows us in this little video.
There is nothing like being accountable to 2 million other people to get you back on track! If you want to learn more about the challenge, here is the Instagram page and the website. It did start on April 4, but that does not mean you can’t jump in and start a daily challenge too.
I am going to post highlights from those in the polymer community doing the challenge on our Instagram account for The Polymer Arts, so follow us there for an easy way to stay in the loop. And if you are taking the challenge, comment on this Instagram post and I will be sure we are following you back as I track the community’s involvement.
A Journey of Exploration
December 12, 2016 Inspirational Art
As many of you are aware, our Winter 2016 issue, themed “On the Surface”, came out weekend before last. Despite some head-spinning challenges in our schedule, we still pulled off a an issue that readers are finding particularly inspiring. My apologies to those folks that lost entire mornings and afternoons as they read the issue cover to cover instead of getting work done or running intended errands. So glad you found it so worthwhile!
The success of this issue was in no small part due to the wonderful contributing artists who gave us so much to look at and so much to think about. Even so, our artists have a much broader range of talent than any single article can even begin to show so this week, we’ll look at what else these talented folks have been up to, starting with Debbie Crothers who gave us the article on Surprising Variety showcasing some unexpected materials to use in polymer surface design.
Debbie has been on a journey of exploration in polymer since we first met online some 8 years ago. She is always coming up with an amazingly wide range of techniques and textures. You are more likely to see her fun treated beads on her Facebook page than completed pieces but lately it’s been the other way around with some stunning results, such as this beauty using an image transfer and crackle technique to throw textural accents into the mix of smooth shapes. I have to admit that the sunset colors are what first grabbed me but then you spend some time looking over the detail and you kind of fall in love with the whole piece.
Debbie has also been a busy girl herself, showing off her brand new website this month. You can find the way to her thoughtful blog there as well as links to her classes, videos, and upcoming workshops. For a retrospective of her work, past and present, jump over to her Flickr photostream to see the interesting journey she’s been on.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Look back through whatever history of your work you have available to you. Where have you been with your work and where are you now? As we approach the new year, let this review help you shape ideas on where to go this coming year. Spend some time just making notes, a goal list or just sketching to help move you along on the next step of your journey.
_________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners.
_________________________________________
Material Suggestions
January 25, 2016 Inspirational Art
If you read Friday’s post about the fashion illustrators who used what we see around us every day to design their images of women’s clothing, then you might see the connecting thread to this week’s theme. I thought we’d explore the idea of the outcome of a technique suggesting the form and imagery of art work.
Crackle techniques and approaches to treating cracked clay have been rather popular the last few years, but they have been primarily used as surface texture in abstract and contemporary jewelry. I can almost see Silvia Ortiz de la Torre looking down at a conditioned sheet (you know how they get those cracked up edges after running it through the pasta machine) or one she created using a cracked clay technique, and with the sheets edge sitting horizontal on the work table, she saw the suggestion of a landscape. Or perhaps she saw crackle work created by other artists and she saw the landscape come out of those pieces. However it came to her, I think we are looking at an example of inspiration coming from the look of the material.
Just as we might look up at the sky and see animals in the clouds, we do also see imagery in what we are creating, unbidden and often unexpected, but it’s there. It’s hard for our minds not to try to create imagery in what it sees. The question is, do you let it guide your work? It is neither right or wrong to explore the imagery you see in the scraps before you or in the treated surface of the clay. It’s just another way to let the material guide what you create.
Silvia is definitely a texture enthusiast. These pieces are actually quite a departure from her bold and highly saturated colors. but the exploration of texture is certainly alive here. You can see more of her textural explorations and other ‘material suggestions’ on her Flickr photostream.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Take a look at something you worked on but didn’t complete or pull out some scrap and start playing with it. Don’t try too hard, just turn it this way and that and ask yourself what you see in it. Do you see faces, animals, objects, places, or patterns you hadn’t seen before? Find something intriguing and let it lead you in a little playtime or into working towards a finished piece.
___________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners:
___________________________________________
Rough Elegance
June 23, 2014 Inspirational Art
When you think of elegance, you probably think of clean lines, understated brilliance and a certain level of delicacy. But elegance can manifest in a number of ways. It can be found in any number of graceful and dignified elements and compositions even those whose other elements are on the rough side. I’ve found this to be true in a number of pieces I’ve seen in the past few weeks. So let’s look at that this week and ask, how can elegance be juxtaposed with a rough, rustic, or less refined approach?
Here is a piece I think embodies that idea wonderfully. There is certainly a lot of the less refined here in the texture of the cracked foil and rough edges. But the centered swirl and skillful application of the overlapping layers along with the limited navy palette gives it a calm and dignified air. This could easily be worn with an evening gown or a dressy business suit or be used to add a touch of elegance to a more casual outfit. That versatility is part of the advantage for a piece that works with two seemingly disparate concepts.
Belarus’ Evgeniya Andreeva is the creator of this lovely necklace. Most of her work tends towards the rough and rustic in a tasteful and well-considered way. Look through her LiveJournal entries and Facebook page for more pretties of hers.
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.
The Infinite Colors of Nature
August 8, 2013 Inspirational Art
I grew up in California, in a coastal desert region where natural color commonly comes in muted tones. In art school, though, I was exposed to landscapes from the southwest that were painted in all kinds of bright and what I thought were unnatural colors. It wasn’t until I actually moved to New Mexico that I saw, even though I was in another desert, that the landscape paintings I witnessed were not an exaggeration. Those deep pinks and oranges, the brilliant greens and purples … they existed even there. It was then that I realized every color we know exists in nature. So thinking that a natural color palette should be restricted to earth tones is really selling nature short.
The other association with nature which is also incorrect is thinking that the natural world is all about growth and life. It is, but life is not all about growth. There is a cycle to it and part of that cycle is the mortality of all elements, the breaking down and return of things both living and inert to the earth and to their most basic components. There is such beauty in this part of the cycle–rust, cracks, crumbling, even organic decay reveals textures and colors to be appreciated.
I have to say, this kind of natural beauty is well represented in polymer. Who doesn’t love a well-done crackled surface or faux patina? Ivana Brozova from the Czech Republic has a body of work that looks to be quite heavily inspired by this side of nature. She combines crackling with some of nature’s more brilliant colors in this pendant.
If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, you should go do so. Compare this pendant, which is very similar in basic design, to the pendant from yesterday–a domed form with a single large gem for a focal point. They are both working with organic elements, but with quite divergent styles. Ivana uses a faceted gem (which, if you recall from yesterday, I said would kill off the sense of nature in that pendant) and bright colors here, but they still evoke a sense of something more organic than man-made. Chances are, if someone is asked what is represented here, I think the most common answer would be sun or sunlight. There are few things more natural than the sun, the one thing that allows nature and life to exist.
But the same goes here as with yesterday’s piece: if the surface treatment of this pendant had been some well-defined graphical pattern with perfectly straight lines or a machined look, the idea of sunlight would not have been conveyed. Cracking is a natural, organic pattern which helps keep the ray-like lines and the sparkle in the faceted gem well within our sense of natural sunlight.
Ivana has a truly lovely collection of work both similar and quite different from the piece here. For a truly special visual treat and great color inspiration, spend some time on her Flicker photostream.
Crackling Fires
July 16, 2013 Inspirational Art
Our association with fire extends beyond the flames and light of it to the affect it has on the materials it burns. Claire Maunsell’s most recent post on her Flickr page, this hollow red and ocher crackle bangle, really caught my eye due somewhat to my penchant for crackle textures but more so for the rough elegance of this piece. It captures the colors and beauty that result from the destructive nature of fire. The way the color is applied reminds me of embers, and the way you’ll see bright red light moving back and forth through a smoldering piece of wood.
The bangle actually has a lot more color than you can see in this image. You really need to go to her Flickr page and see the various close-up photos of this piece, not to mention the rest of her wonderfully aged and weathered looking work.
Take an already enticing, beautiful organic texture like crackle and literally “bump” it up with a wonderfully organic bumpy texture and you’ve got a real powerhouse of a textural combination.
That’s basically what Shelley Atwood did with these otherwise simply designed earrings. You really wouldn’t want to do a lot more with this as you would risk making this overly busy. The simple round shape and the round negative space reflect the roundness in the bumps but then the crackle comes in with an edgy and erratic energy that contrasts nicely with the predominate soft forms and shapes. The choice of color also brings additional energy to this organic terrain, the reds and yellows playing nicely with this contrasting combination of textures.
Shelley has been playing with dots and bumps and other heavily textured surface applications and techniques for quite a while now. Her Flickr photostream looks like a massive sampler of textural surface design possibilities in polymer. Pop over there or peruse her portfolio on her website for all kinds of textural inspiration.
Read MoreOne 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.
Read MoreGinger Davis Allman of The Blue Bottle Tree is doing a veneer day. A post of hers on Facebook alerted me to the #the100dayproject challenge she is doing these for and I figured that if Ginger, as busy as she gets, is doing this, then I should be able to as well so we busy women are getting even busier!
#the100dayproject is a general artistic challenge on Instagram to create one something each day for 100 days. The participant determines what they will do and with what medium, if they are even that specific. Some people are doing nothing but doodles while other people are creating completed pieces.
For instance, while Ginger is doing veneers in polymer, I am creating textural pieces and writing poetry to go with it (I’m posting these to my personal Instagram page, The Sage Arts.) The image here is Ginger’s Day 2 project. Her beautiful crackle is overlaid with silkscreen. It looks even cooler when you see it move as Ginger shows us in this little video.
There is nothing like being accountable to 2 million other people to get you back on track! If you want to learn more about the challenge, here is the Instagram page and the website. It did start on April 4, but that does not mean you can’t jump in and start a daily challenge too.
I am going to post highlights from those in the polymer community doing the challenge on our Instagram account for The Polymer Arts, so follow us there for an easy way to stay in the loop. And if you are taking the challenge, comment on this Instagram post and I will be sure we are following you back as I track the community’s involvement.
Read MoreAs many of you are aware, our Winter 2016 issue, themed “On the Surface”, came out weekend before last. Despite some head-spinning challenges in our schedule, we still pulled off a an issue that readers are finding particularly inspiring. My apologies to those folks that lost entire mornings and afternoons as they read the issue cover to cover instead of getting work done or running intended errands. So glad you found it so worthwhile!
The success of this issue was in no small part due to the wonderful contributing artists who gave us so much to look at and so much to think about. Even so, our artists have a much broader range of talent than any single article can even begin to show so this week, we’ll look at what else these talented folks have been up to, starting with Debbie Crothers who gave us the article on Surprising Variety showcasing some unexpected materials to use in polymer surface design.
Debbie has been on a journey of exploration in polymer since we first met online some 8 years ago. She is always coming up with an amazingly wide range of techniques and textures. You are more likely to see her fun treated beads on her Facebook page than completed pieces but lately it’s been the other way around with some stunning results, such as this beauty using an image transfer and crackle technique to throw textural accents into the mix of smooth shapes. I have to admit that the sunset colors are what first grabbed me but then you spend some time looking over the detail and you kind of fall in love with the whole piece.
Debbie has also been a busy girl herself, showing off her brand new website this month. You can find the way to her thoughtful blog there as well as links to her classes, videos, and upcoming workshops. For a retrospective of her work, past and present, jump over to her Flickr photostream to see the interesting journey she’s been on.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Look back through whatever history of your work you have available to you. Where have you been with your work and where are you now? As we approach the new year, let this review help you shape ideas on where to go this coming year. Spend some time just making notes, a goal list or just sketching to help move you along on the next step of your journey.
_________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners.
_________________________________________
Read MoreIf you read Friday’s post about the fashion illustrators who used what we see around us every day to design their images of women’s clothing, then you might see the connecting thread to this week’s theme. I thought we’d explore the idea of the outcome of a technique suggesting the form and imagery of art work.
Crackle techniques and approaches to treating cracked clay have been rather popular the last few years, but they have been primarily used as surface texture in abstract and contemporary jewelry. I can almost see Silvia Ortiz de la Torre looking down at a conditioned sheet (you know how they get those cracked up edges after running it through the pasta machine) or one she created using a cracked clay technique, and with the sheets edge sitting horizontal on the work table, she saw the suggestion of a landscape. Or perhaps she saw crackle work created by other artists and she saw the landscape come out of those pieces. However it came to her, I think we are looking at an example of inspiration coming from the look of the material.
Just as we might look up at the sky and see animals in the clouds, we do also see imagery in what we are creating, unbidden and often unexpected, but it’s there. It’s hard for our minds not to try to create imagery in what it sees. The question is, do you let it guide your work? It is neither right or wrong to explore the imagery you see in the scraps before you or in the treated surface of the clay. It’s just another way to let the material guide what you create.
Silvia is definitely a texture enthusiast. These pieces are actually quite a departure from her bold and highly saturated colors. but the exploration of texture is certainly alive here. You can see more of her textural explorations and other ‘material suggestions’ on her Flickr photostream.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Take a look at something you worked on but didn’t complete or pull out some scrap and start playing with it. Don’t try too hard, just turn it this way and that and ask yourself what you see in it. Do you see faces, animals, objects, places, or patterns you hadn’t seen before? Find something intriguing and let it lead you in a little playtime or into working towards a finished piece.
___________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners:
___________________________________________
Read MoreWhen you think of elegance, you probably think of clean lines, understated brilliance and a certain level of delicacy. But elegance can manifest in a number of ways. It can be found in any number of graceful and dignified elements and compositions even those whose other elements are on the rough side. I’ve found this to be true in a number of pieces I’ve seen in the past few weeks. So let’s look at that this week and ask, how can elegance be juxtaposed with a rough, rustic, or less refined approach?
Here is a piece I think embodies that idea wonderfully. There is certainly a lot of the less refined here in the texture of the cracked foil and rough edges. But the centered swirl and skillful application of the overlapping layers along with the limited navy palette gives it a calm and dignified air. This could easily be worn with an evening gown or a dressy business suit or be used to add a touch of elegance to a more casual outfit. That versatility is part of the advantage for a piece that works with two seemingly disparate concepts.
Belarus’ Evgeniya Andreeva is the creator of this lovely necklace. Most of her work tends towards the rough and rustic in a tasteful and well-considered way. Look through her LiveJournal entries and Facebook page for more pretties of hers.
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.
Read MoreI grew up in California, in a coastal desert region where natural color commonly comes in muted tones. In art school, though, I was exposed to landscapes from the southwest that were painted in all kinds of bright and what I thought were unnatural colors. It wasn’t until I actually moved to New Mexico that I saw, even though I was in another desert, that the landscape paintings I witnessed were not an exaggeration. Those deep pinks and oranges, the brilliant greens and purples … they existed even there. It was then that I realized every color we know exists in nature. So thinking that a natural color palette should be restricted to earth tones is really selling nature short.
The other association with nature which is also incorrect is thinking that the natural world is all about growth and life. It is, but life is not all about growth. There is a cycle to it and part of that cycle is the mortality of all elements, the breaking down and return of things both living and inert to the earth and to their most basic components. There is such beauty in this part of the cycle–rust, cracks, crumbling, even organic decay reveals textures and colors to be appreciated.
I have to say, this kind of natural beauty is well represented in polymer. Who doesn’t love a well-done crackled surface or faux patina? Ivana Brozova from the Czech Republic has a body of work that looks to be quite heavily inspired by this side of nature. She combines crackling with some of nature’s more brilliant colors in this pendant.
If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, you should go do so. Compare this pendant, which is very similar in basic design, to the pendant from yesterday–a domed form with a single large gem for a focal point. They are both working with organic elements, but with quite divergent styles. Ivana uses a faceted gem (which, if you recall from yesterday, I said would kill off the sense of nature in that pendant) and bright colors here, but they still evoke a sense of something more organic than man-made. Chances are, if someone is asked what is represented here, I think the most common answer would be sun or sunlight. There are few things more natural than the sun, the one thing that allows nature and life to exist.
But the same goes here as with yesterday’s piece: if the surface treatment of this pendant had been some well-defined graphical pattern with perfectly straight lines or a machined look, the idea of sunlight would not have been conveyed. Cracking is a natural, organic pattern which helps keep the ray-like lines and the sparkle in the faceted gem well within our sense of natural sunlight.
Ivana has a truly lovely collection of work both similar and quite different from the piece here. For a truly special visual treat and great color inspiration, spend some time on her Flicker photostream.
Read More
Our association with fire extends beyond the flames and light of it to the affect it has on the materials it burns. Claire Maunsell’s most recent post on her Flickr page, this hollow red and ocher crackle bangle, really caught my eye due somewhat to my penchant for crackle textures but more so for the rough elegance of this piece. It captures the colors and beauty that result from the destructive nature of fire. The way the color is applied reminds me of embers, and the way you’ll see bright red light moving back and forth through a smoldering piece of wood.
The bangle actually has a lot more color than you can see in this image. You really need to go to her Flickr page and see the various close-up photos of this piece, not to mention the rest of her wonderfully aged and weathered looking work.
Read More