Shimmer and Swirl
December 21, 2018
Inspirational Art
This bit of drama in silver is not, of course, polymer, but just look at the textures and possibilities!
The drama comes from the swirling motion initiated by the ammonite shell but this artist team, Sergey Toritsyn and Svetlana Larina, selling under the shop Art-Dreams on Livemaster, have ramped up the energy with a variety of textures and lines that move off the central body of the work. The bezeled stones help to put the brakes on this just enough to keep it in the barely contained state but that just adds to the beauty and satisfying feeling of the movement in the piece. The shimmer of the ammonite interior also helps to anchor our eyes towards the center so that our eyes wander from the sparkle and shimmer to the swirling wire to the stones and back to center again.
The piece is a great example of well-composed movement in jewelry as well as being an intriguing piece to just visually investigate. From the lined-up granulation in the center to the bits of color under the wires near the base of where most of them start (enamel, I think), there is just a ton of detail to take in and admire.
This is the most complex piece of theirs that I found but they have plenty of other work to admire on their Livemaster page here.
Silver Inspired
December 17, 2018
Inspirational Art
So here we are, a week before Christmas and I thought it best if I can share some things to put us in that holiday spirit. As for me, I think I’ve had enough of Santa Clauses, Christmas wreaths, snowmen and candy canes. Not that there’s anything wrong with those motifs but you’re seeing those everywhere right now. So I get to thinking about the season in a more noncommercial way and, perusing through my collection of art to share at a future time I found myself drawn to the silver pieces. There’s something about the stately near whiteness of silver that feel so appropriate for this time of year. Its quiet and yet bright manner are also seen everywhere in silver bells, silver ribbon, silver tinsel, and even outside our windows for those of us who get to admire a snowy night landscape. I don’t know if that wholly explains what I’m doing with silver this week but that’s going to be our theme.
This is a piece that started me thinking on it. It’s a recent necklace by Celine Charuau. I had been thinking stars like on the top of Christmas trees or the radiating ones often found in nativity scenes but this is what I ended up finding. It’s not a star but is a beautiful radiating piece full of texture and still presenting that quiet, stately feel. The lines in the urchin are followed by the lines of the silver pieces radiating from the center and, combining with the silver color, gives us a sense that it is heralding some moment or celebrating an occasion. It may seem like a stretch but it feels a little like Christmas to me.
Of course, Celine’s work is often quiet and stately, using pale or subdued colors and lots of silver. You can see more of her work on her Flickr photostream.
Circularly Supported Rectangles
November 23, 2018
Inspirational Art
I hope all my fellow US folks had a beautiful Thanksgiving with lots of family and maybe not too much food. How can you do all that shopping today if you’re still stuffed from the day before? No shopping for me today. I’m running off with the family to enjoy some downtime. I thought I’d leave you with these little beauties to contemplate.
These are by Cecilie Hveding, a metalsmith and enamel jewelry artist in Norway. She works in a number of different styles but this set really struck me as having a lot of parallels to the approaches often taken in polymer. Layering her materials, much as we often do in polymer, she has really showcased the color and luminescence of enamel on simple rectangular pendants. What works as a bail is a beautifully simple solution to keeping the clean lines and balanced shapes of the almost picture-frame-like compositions. The circles are not only functional, allowing a cord to be looped through for a simple pendant connection, but they also contrast with the dominance of straight lines, then allow an echo of that shape in the dangling bead at the end which works with the open circle as a kind of bookend set for the design.
So if you’re not out shopping or having to work today and want to discover a new artist, jump over to Cecilie’s website to look at the broad range of her work.
Squiggles and Swirls
September 21, 2018
Inspirational Art
Now that we’ve been talking about squiggles all week, are you seeing them everywhere? They are used in artwork of all kinds, commonly inspired by nature, often stylized or reined in to create a more cohesive composition. But they can also run rampant, gaining cohesiveness from the way they echo each other within the same piece.
Take a look at the various squiggles in this journal cover by Gabrielle Pollacco. Gabrielle is primarily a scrapbook artist but has also discovered the joys of combining polymer with pages. The bonsai tree in the center is a polymer clay wall and the rest is paint-applied wood stencils and various mixed-media elements attached over and under painted layers.
The frame-like squiggle piece around the bonsai tree looks to be derived from the stylized squiggle work seen in Art Nouveau. There is a less orderly but still contained series of lines going from squiggles into cracks amongst the rocks at the bottom. Then the vines with leaves throughout the background at the top gently pull the eye upward. There are also a handful of swirls—the buttoned-up cousin of the squiggle—with their terminal end a focal point as it rounds in on itself. All these lines, especially the squiggles, create a riot of energy. But with a strong focal point of the polymer tree in the center, it still feels grounded.
Scrapbooking is such a great marriage of so many materials. A skilled and creative scrapbooker, like Gabrielle, creates works of art that could so readily be framed and placed on a wall for all to adore. But making it part of something that is functional, that is held and touched and itself holds treasured images, makes the idea of putting it on the wall on almost sacrilegious. Even if, like me, you’re one of those people who doesn’t spend much time organizing or even just printing out their photos, it would be hard not to appreciate the creativity of these unique works.
You can take a look at more of Gabrielle’s wonderfully intricate scrapbook covers and pages on her BlogSpot website.
Noelia in the Spotlight
July 11, 2018
Inspirational Art
Hello, all you fabulous people! It’s really good to be back. After over two weeks of being detached from this community, I’m really happy to plug back in. I’ve not had a lot of time to do research for this week’s additional two posts, so no theme this week. Just some quick peeks at what people have been up to.
I had hoped to meet up with one or two polymer people in Spain but it was hard to carve out time as I was only in Barcelona and was with 22 other family members. But I did stop to see what our Spanish folks have been up to and saw that Noelia Contreras Martín has been quite the busy girl lately. She hails from Ripollet, a town just outside Barcelona proper. Her work has enjoyed the spotlight in print this year.
This image is from her tutorial in Polymer Week, the new-ish magazine out of the Czech Republic which just released its spring issue in PDF. Noelia was also featured in Polymere & Co. earlier this year in an artistic interview article. It’s no surprise the attention she’s getting, with her clean lines and bright colors. If you’re unfamiliar with her work you can pick up one of these magazines or visit her Instagram or her Facebook page. And if you are, by chance, in Spain next month you might consider joining her at Polimeralia, a three-day workshop event in Valencia, Spain, August 3-7, 2018.
Also, these two magazines mentioned may be just the thing you’re looking for to fill in the gaps left by Polymer Café and From Polymer to Art. Polymer Week, available in English and Czech, offers project tutorials and interviews geared to inspire and inform hobbyists and newer clayers in our community. Polymere & Co. also features project tutorials and interviews but often includes articles discussing technique and some more advanced concepts. However, it is only in French at this time. I get my copies and then copy the text into Google translate for the articles I want to read so it takes a little more work, unless you speak French. It is, however, an inexpensively priced magazine at approximately $6 US/5€ for the digital back issues and $12 shipped to the US/10€ to Europe. Polymer Week is $10 for the digital PDF edition or you can purchase print copies for $18.50 in the US and, it looks like, about an 11.50€ in the EU.
Shaking Color
June 13, 2018
Inspirational Art
Imbuing your pieces with energetic color has a lot to do with contrast. The colors do not necessarily have to be bold and bright, although bright colors have an inherent energy of their own, but rather they need to be a mix of warm and cool, bright and muted, or any combination of color characteristics that make the colors vie for dominance, visually.
The colors in this brooch by Pavla Cepelikova have a fun combination of bright and muted as well as cool and warm colors. By themselves, they would give this piece a moderate amount of energy. Applying the colors in stripes adds to the intensity of energy as variation in color alternates up and down those striped strips.
Her use of lines also adds a tremendous amount of energy. Not unlike the way they use lines in animation to denote when something is moving, she has added energetic lines around the petals as if they are shaking on the surface of the brooch. The combination of energetic color and lines makes for a very lively piece.
This combination of line and color energy seems to be a recent exploration of Pavla’s. You can see what she’s done with it so far on her Flickr photostream and in her Etsy shop.
Detailed Color, 10% off Sale, New Books!
June 11, 2018
Inspirational Art
Things are super busy over here at TPA headquarters polishing up a brand new website. So we thought would make it busier (and because we will need to hold off on doing sales promotions on the new site for little bit) by bringing you a 10% off Everything in Your Cart Sale! The sale is good through June 14. Use the promo code TPASITE on our website.
We also have initial announcements about new books and our upcoming new website! But instead of filling up your blog post here with details, I’ll leave you with a link to our newsletter here to get all the news.
I thought we could look at busy color this week but find examples that keep it contained, manageable, and a real pleasure to view. A broad and varied colored pattern can add a lot of interest and energetic detail to a piece without being overwhelming. You just need a few points of keeping it controlled.
This pendant is by Jana Lehmann, part of a newer series of hers involving lots of color, lines and folded clay. Her patterns are further enhanced by her many little details—dots and spots and patterned borders. It is visually energetic as well as making you want to reach out and touch its very tactile surface. But for all its busyness, it is well contained within its borders and thick pendant form.
Take a look at her many variations with necklaces, rings, and brooches found on her Facebook page and Flickr photostream.
A Painterly Cane
June 1, 2018
Inspirational Art
Here’s one last example for this week of these incredible illustrative image canes we are seeing these days. This one uses the more familiar and common imagery of flowers which so many cane makers are inspired by. However, the way Jayne Dwyer creates her flower here makes it look like a painting, with color variation and details that are not very common in polymer clay flower canes.
Jayne employees outlining, which we saw at work in Claire’s piece on Monday, but here it is quite a bit more dramatic with its black and white outlines. The soft gradation of color plays a contrast to the hard black-and-white delineation around the flower. It makes it really pop. She also created a painterly background for the flower within the cane itself. The streaks of color are varied but create radiating lines that give an energized, dimensional feel to the petals.
And then she has these spots of color that pop up within those gradations. It’s very detailed and interesting to look at closely and imagine all the decisions she made to come up with this image. I don’t suppose the decisions are much different than one would make when painting, but in polymer, each decision takes some serious confidence and dedication to the image since how it will look is not going to be wholly apparent until after reduction.
Take a close-up look for yourself at the image in this cane or go to a bigger image on Facebook. You can also see more of the work Jayne does on her website.
Moving Organic Forms
May 18, 2018
Inspirational Art
A little business first …
On Sunday, we release the Summer 2018 issue of The Polymer Arts, themed “Everything in Its Place”. You can still subscribe or pre-order the digital edition and get it Sunday morning with everyone else, or subscribe or purchase to get a print edition and we will mail those out when we get our boxes mid-week. Active print subscribers and print pre-orders will get theirs sorted through the post office today and so those should start popping up in mailboxes next week. Mind you, they might need 2-3 weeks to get to you should you live on the US East or South coast or overseas.
Now to the artwork. I thought that today, we would move away from floral into a different kind of organic beauty. And a different medium. I figured, who doesn’t love a bit of iridescent lampwork?
These pieces were actually created about five years ago but Andriy Mykolenko still creates beautiful, long, twisted beads of glass along with other traditional and not-so-traditional lampwork forms. However, this was easily my favorite set that I could find. The gradation of color, the line of the dots, and the waving forms create so much motion and energy. And he arranged them beautifully for this photo, poised to suggest a strange but fascinating hollow flower or an alien sun.
I’ve had a renewed interest in lampwork beads of late, primarily because I think with the new Sculpey super clear liquid polymer, more exploration of faux lampwork bead forms is about due. As soon as I get this latest issue wrapped up I’m going to set aside some playtime for just that. And if faux lampwork doesn’t entice you, perhaps the shape of these beads will give you some ideas for really energetic new bead forms.
To see more of Andriy’s lampwork forms, check out his Etsy shop.
I know I usually only do one week of a theme but we’re going to kind of continue with flowers and transition into other organic beauty this week. I’m just letting serendipity choose for us. And serendipity chose that we look at a few more unique floral items.
This wall sconce was created by Judith Ligon. This is one of her signature forms and, in my opinion, what she does best. She calls this heart-shaped wall vase a Posey pocket. The decoration on these works like a continuation of the vase’s content. The floral elements come down the front from the vase’s upper edge with lines and vine impressions creating an echoing backdrop to the stems and leaves that might be here. The placement of these decorative elements causes them to blend with the flowers and other natural contributions set in it. This way the vase and the flowers become one cohesive decorative object.
Judith sells her work through her website and shows off her latest pieces on Instagram.
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Although this is not part of #the100dayproject, Nevenka Sabo stopped to show us what she does with the sheets she has been creating on her challenge so far.
Nevenka has been working with the torn watercolor technique that Maggie Maggio created. In this small bowl, she uses these surface treatments to create vibrant color and variation within the swirling and crackled lines of the nautilus shell design. The movement and energy of this combination of line and color have made for quite the eye-catching piece as can be seen in the long list of comments about it in the post.
To keep an eye on Nevenka’s challenge and what she does with her watercolor polymer studies, follow her Instagram page. Also, don’t miss out on her tutorials found in her in her Etsy shop.
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If you want to get right to it and make some wonderful all around gifts, it’s hard to go wrong with scarf pins. Or hair pins. Or shawl pins. Which are all really the same thing, aren’t they?
These pins are simply a sturdy base around a circular hole large enough to get a scarf or bundle of hair pressed into so a stick can be inserted behind or through, holding it in place. And for that, all you need is a small stack of clay sheets, and a cutter for the hole to get you started. How you decorate the surface of the clay is then wide open for you. Create a stick to match by wrapping clay around a skewer or a very stiff bit of wire and apply a similar surface treatment.
Cat Szetu just loved making pins like this one here. I say this in the past tense because I have not been able to find recent work of hers online. Perhaps she is really busy making pins. But I do like this example because the surface is decorated in a rather straightforward manner, with slivers of clay cut from a Skinner blended sheet, curling around the surface. That gradation of color and the smooth curving lines create a quiet and calm type of visual movement that, together, keeps the simple layering of clay from feeling stale.
Cat has plenty more pieces to jumpstart your own ideas. Just go to her Flickr photostream and scroll around.
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I thought I’d continue to keep it simple this week and still talk a little about line, the theme of the latest issue of The Polymer Arts that came out last weekend.
This simple pendant by Yuliya Zharova uses two elements to tell a story—line and dots. The form of the people here is nothing more thank tall lines with a variation in thick and thin. The dots on the top of this line make up the heads, and the small dots and large gold one somehow become stars and a moon. It’s quite amazing how much can be shown with so little detail. But lines, in particular, can do that. It is a nice reminder of how little we really have to put down to get our viewers to see what we have to convey.
It is also a nice reminder that line has characteristics and qualities of its own. They do not always have to be even. The way the line is formed can convey imagery, as we see here, or emotion. The articles on design and the technique tutorials on using lines and dots and soutache to create emotion and texture will help fill in more on those ideas when you get to reading our latest issue.
Yuliya’s compositions are almost all some variation online and dots and are all lovely in their understated design. See more of her work in her Etsy shop, Wild Onion Art.
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I know this week will be a particularly busy one for many of us, especially in the US where we are kicking off the holiday season with our family-oriented Thanksgiving festivities involving way too much food and way too much shopping to follow it up the next day.
So for today, I thought I would harken to the theme of the just-released issue of The Polymer Arts, our Winter 2017 – Line, with a simple piece that represents a quality of line that I discuss in the article in this issue, “The Language of Line.” The simple circling forms, in the signature wavering organic forms of Anarina Anar, keep the composition centered and focused with a soft energy that continuously winds around in these soft but warm colors. Although the pendant is three-dimensional, it is the line the forms follow that gives the piece its balance and verve.
For more of Anarina’s colorful and energetic compositions, take a look at her Flickr site or her Etsy store. And to learn more about line, get a hold of your copy of this wonderful issue through our website if you have not seen it already or have it on its way to you.
Read MoreSo finding an inspiring quote about lines has not been very easy. There is always the “color outside the lines” adage–but yes, we all know that breaking the rules is part of creating art. Then a friend told me about this short film, a collaboration between Salvador Dali and Disney Animation; and although it’s not a quote nor do I see any particular message in it to talk about, there are some really beautiful lines and forms in it, especially in the long flowing hair of the woman that is followed throughout–talk about wild lines and tendrils! It’s only about 6 minutes and well worth the time. (The video may look cut off in some browsers but you can just click here to see it at well.)
http://youtu.be/1GFkN4deuZU
Interesting lines are all around us. Search them out as you go through your day today, and see what you can find that you hadn’t noticed before.
It would be hard to bring up a week of squiggly, wild lines and not post something from Chris Kapono. Being a lover and creator of tendril adorned work myself, I was just tranfixed by Chris’s Flickr page when I first found it some five years ago. She goes heavy on the dots and spots as well, but it’s the movement of the lines she creates that add that really dynamic element to her work. Here is a rather tame example of her wild lines, but I thought it would be a nice change for this week since she has several kinds of wandering lines in this diptych tile piece.
The random wandering of her lines is consistent with the random scattering of elements across the tiles. She does have some lovely directional tendrils the begin or end with curls for some consistency between them. The large hill like wave of a line unites the two tiles and and gives the pieces a grounding focus. The rough band of white at the bottom is an erratic yet fluffy feeling line that pushes us to think of clouds, and that maybe we are floating above them where the starry night sky and winds have gone wild.
More of Chris’ wild lines and tendrils can be viewed on her Etsy site, Deviant Art, and, as mentioned, Flickr.
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Wait a minute … isn’t this Friday? The day we look at some non-polymer? So what, then, is this piece made from? It sure looks like it could be polymer. It could be said to be a bit Dustin or Dever-esque even. But it’s not polymer at all.
This piece is by artist Tania Radda. She works in wood. That’s right–those tendrils spinning off the stem of this bud-like form are wood, brightly painted with automotive paint. I would not have thought of using wood to create such delicate lines and forms, but until Nan Roche started knitting with extruded polymer, I never thought of polymer as something to create loose, independent lines from either. It can be quite wonderful to see how far a material can be pushed and still fulfill the intention of the work created. Could polymer hold up the weight from this kind of form leaning on it? I can imagine that yes, it would with wire or other stiff reinforcement. It’s got me thinking about just how thin our lines could go. It may be nothing but a mental exercise, but that’s the kind of questioning of limitations that new techniques and improved approaches come from. Never accept that the way most things are done is the right or only way. Half of being an artist is exploring and half of exploring is failing and making mistakes. But that is how we learn and grow and discover the really cool stuff.
Read MoreAs I looked around for more wild lines today, it occurred to me that the predominant squiggle source in polymer is actually found in mokume gane. Although the lines in mokume can be controlled and consistent if you want them to be, I think the real joy in the technique comes from the mystery of an unknown outcome and the wandering lines the hidden layers reveal.
This bracelet by Melanie Muir is quite the mokume gone wild. High contrast colors and variation from bead to bead make this bit of clay “doodling” quite intriguing.
Melanie is also quite the master at finishing her work. The careful edges and high polish are definitely something to aspire to. Take a look at some of her latest pieces on her website here. If you are still in the mood for more wild lines, I would suggest diving into her archive gallery, where the modest squiggle can be found quite readily.
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