All It’s Cracked Up To Be
March 17, 2019
Inspirational Art
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
- The IPCA announced the winners of the IPCA awards on Wednesday. Here is a video presentation of it. Or you can find the list here.
- Registration is now open for Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes new online course, Matrix Canes.
- What are you doing with your tax refund this year? How about getting that NeverKnead machine you’ve been wanting for forever? Get 10% off your new machine now on the website. Use promo code 10PERCENT.
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
Holes in our Lives
April 4, 2017
Inspirational Art
First I must apologize that I didn’t get a blog out on Saturday. My father took a turn for the worse on Friday and that same day most of my siblings along with my kids and grandkids arrived to help me celebrate my recent marriage. After much deliberation, we went ahead with the celebration as there was nothing we could do and it could be weeks before the inevitable with dad. We toasted to dad at my house Sunday only to find out that as we toasted, he passed away. I’m not sure how I feel yet. We did not have a good relationship most of my life but we were friends in the end. I think that makes this easier to take but harder to navigate as I don’t know what emotions may surface as the days go by.
I almost took the week off from blogging but decided it wouldn’t matter much. Work and art is what often keeps us going through the many ups and downs that life throws at us. Art is also, for me and many others, a very honest thing, and I think, when you have a complicated relationship with a person who figured hugely in your life, art can be a refuge, an exploration, and a comfort as one figures things out when they are suddenly no longer there.
Right now, I am not sad, rather, I am relieved as he’d been through so much the last few years. But there is a hole that I will have to figure out how to fill or to live with. I don’t mind holes … you can see things through them, revealing layers and depths and you can’t help but notice them. So this week, my posts might be short, I just don’t know yet, but I’ll post pieces where holes and spaces play a large part. And maybe we can all look at what these spaces mean to us.
So today, with holes and cracks and imperfections that I think all come together as pure beauty, I have a selection of focal beads by Staci Louise Smith. The various textures could symbolize the complexity of our lives and our emotions. I love the way the central swath of crackle looks like a horizon and is also the point at which the holes appear. There is a lot of metaphor we could pull out of pieces like these. That is the wonder and beauty of art, that the best of it let’s us read what we need to from it.
For more of Staci’s work, you can wander over to her website or spend some time on her blog.
_________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners.
_________________________________________
Plethora of Patterned Plates
June 15, 2016
Uncategorized
We have some incredibly beautiful work in the gallery sections this issue. We are very fortunate that we got Bonnie Bishoff and J.M. Syron to showcase their new work (and grace the cover) and are thrilled to have the latest work from Staci Smith to share with you, as well.
The surprise gem of our collection in the Summer issue of The Polymer Arts galleries, I think, is the beautifully patterned plates by Arieta Stavridou of Nicosia, Cyprus. We had an incidental conversation on Facebook about the Polymer Journeys book and in clicking through I found this photo of them. Not that applying canes to plates is new, but her pattern and color choices are just gorgeous. Placement, orientation, and pattern combinations are very intentional, intention being so important in art, especially in something like this. I loaded a large image of this plate collection so you can click on it and see the detail better.
I talk a bit more about intention in art in my editor’s letter in this issue, as well. And, of course, we have many more of Arieta’s plates to admire along with her fun teapots in the Summer issue’s gallery pages. You can also see more of her work on her Facebook pages.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Create or design a piece with very intentional repeated but varied patterns. This can be several different canes, hand tooled marks, or repeated motifs. You could even do a combination of these. Combine the elements used for the pattern based on some specific concept. Any concept will do as long as it has a very intentional connection, such as analogous colors, the flowers in your garden, symbols of ancient Greece, or images that remind you of your beach vacation.
_________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners:
_________________________________________
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
- The IPCA announced the winners of the IPCA awards on Wednesday. Here is a video presentation of it. Or you can find the list here.
- Registration is now open for Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes new online course, Matrix Canes.
- What are you doing with your tax refund this year? How about getting that NeverKnead machine you’ve been wanting for forever? Get 10% off your new machine now on the website. Use promo code 10PERCENT.
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
First I must apologize that I didn’t get a blog out on Saturday. My father took a turn for the worse on Friday and that same day most of my siblings along with my kids and grandkids arrived to help me celebrate my recent marriage. After much deliberation, we went ahead with the celebration as there was nothing we could do and it could be weeks before the inevitable with dad. We toasted to dad at my house Sunday only to find out that as we toasted, he passed away. I’m not sure how I feel yet. We did not have a good relationship most of my life but we were friends in the end. I think that makes this easier to take but harder to navigate as I don’t know what emotions may surface as the days go by.
I almost took the week off from blogging but decided it wouldn’t matter much. Work and art is what often keeps us going through the many ups and downs that life throws at us. Art is also, for me and many others, a very honest thing, and I think, when you have a complicated relationship with a person who figured hugely in your life, art can be a refuge, an exploration, and a comfort as one figures things out when they are suddenly no longer there.
Right now, I am not sad, rather, I am relieved as he’d been through so much the last few years. But there is a hole that I will have to figure out how to fill or to live with. I don’t mind holes … you can see things through them, revealing layers and depths and you can’t help but notice them. So this week, my posts might be short, I just don’t know yet, but I’ll post pieces where holes and spaces play a large part. And maybe we can all look at what these spaces mean to us.
So today, with holes and cracks and imperfections that I think all come together as pure beauty, I have a selection of focal beads by Staci Louise Smith. The various textures could symbolize the complexity of our lives and our emotions. I love the way the central swath of crackle looks like a horizon and is also the point at which the holes appear. There is a lot of metaphor we could pull out of pieces like these. That is the wonder and beauty of art, that the best of it let’s us read what we need to from it.
For more of Staci’s work, you can wander over to her website or spend some time on her blog.
_________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners.
_________________________________________
Read MoreWe have some incredibly beautiful work in the gallery sections this issue. We are very fortunate that we got Bonnie Bishoff and J.M. Syron to showcase their new work (and grace the cover) and are thrilled to have the latest work from Staci Smith to share with you, as well.
The surprise gem of our collection in the Summer issue of The Polymer Arts galleries, I think, is the beautifully patterned plates by Arieta Stavridou of Nicosia, Cyprus. We had an incidental conversation on Facebook about the Polymer Journeys book and in clicking through I found this photo of them. Not that applying canes to plates is new, but her pattern and color choices are just gorgeous. Placement, orientation, and pattern combinations are very intentional, intention being so important in art, especially in something like this. I loaded a large image of this plate collection so you can click on it and see the detail better.
I talk a bit more about intention in art in my editor’s letter in this issue, as well. And, of course, we have many more of Arieta’s plates to admire along with her fun teapots in the Summer issue’s gallery pages. You can also see more of her work on her Facebook pages.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Create or design a piece with very intentional repeated but varied patterns. This can be several different canes, hand tooled marks, or repeated motifs. You could even do a combination of these. Combine the elements used for the pattern based on some specific concept. Any concept will do as long as it has a very intentional connection, such as analogous colors, the flowers in your garden, symbols of ancient Greece, or images that remind you of your beach vacation.
_________________________________________
Like this blog? Lend your support with a purchase of The Polymer Arts magazine and visit our partners:
_________________________________________
Read More