Spring is Almost Here …
February 1, 2016
Inspirational Art
… not that you can tell by the weather! But we are doing our best to get you a bit of Spring by the end of February. Here is your first peek at the next issue of The Polymer Arts, Spring 2016 – Convergence. The issue is set to come out around March 1st.
Gracing our cover is the fabulous Fabiola Periz Ajates, otherwise known as Fabi. And what a fitting name. These brooches give you an idea of some of the articles and eye candy you’ll see in this mixed media, yet polymer-centric, issue. We’ve been trying for a while to do mixed media again, but we had to wait until we had the best ideas and great artists to share them and we really think we do.
Articles you can look forward to include:
- Focal Convergence: Composing with Focal Points
- Converging Clays: Create Metal Clay & Polymer
- Found Fusion: Working with Found Objects
- Fold, Cut, Shred, and Clay: Exploring Paper & Polymer
- All Knotted Up: Polymer & Micro Macrame Designs
- When is a Technique Ready to Share?
- The Best Camera for You and Your Art
- The Perfect Cure: The Final Word on Time & Temperature
- Training Your Artistic Eye
- Convergence at Ravensdale, 20 Years Later
- … and so much more!
I am off today for a family gathering so we are going to get a breather from the challenges today, but I will be back with one on Wed!
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Repeating Yourself
January 29, 2016
Inspirational Art
It’s been a week of seeing something new in something you already have in front of you, and I have been having a lot of fun with the ideas while readers have been getting quite a kick out of what we’ve been sharing. So, let’s do this one more time, but with a twist. Let’s try out repetition and pattern.
Nature is full of repeated elements all brought together to create beautiful and perfectly formed patterns. If you follow nature’s guidelines, you can take any form or element and make it in the same or graduating sizes and repeat them side-by-side, over-lapping, sitting on top of one another, or all in a row. The formation is not as important to these beautiful patterns as the precision and consistency of form and placement. Apparently, an artichoke suggested the placement of the beautiful pieces that make up this necklace by Eva Ehmeier. Or maybe she created them and it made her think of artichokes. But the natural repetitive element is there, echoing that recognizable natural beauty.
This technique of layered, folded, and repeated elements has been a common approach of Eva’s in years past and she has plenty of examples of it on her Flickr photostream and her website.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Find a natural repeated pattern that intrigues you and try recreating the pattern using a favorite element. Nature has patterns everywhere. You might find yours in your fridge, a garden, on a hiking path, or something you see at the zoo. Recreate the pattern, not what you were inspired by. You don’t need an element that will recreate the look of that turtle shell, just something that can be fitted together in a regular pattern, like the hexagonal sections of the shell do. Or layer your favorite bright blue and purple canes slices in that similar overlay pattern you found in a pine cone you picked up. Try to see only the pattern and bring that into the studio or your sketchbook.
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An Artist’s Tail
January 27, 2016
Inspirational Art
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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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.
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Outside Inspiration: Burning Up and Looking Through
January 22, 2016
Inspirational Art
These little unexpected beauties are brought to us by Debbie Crothers who just dropped them onto my Facebook page last week. These were created by Armenian fashion illustrator Edgar Artis who uses common objects and scenes to take some basic fashion concepts beyond the ordinary. The matches dress illustration is so simple, but between the heavily directional lines and the ‘hot’ implication of the material, it is a rather arresting image. The cut-outs, however, are simply a fantastic way to test out color and texture. Edgar was not the first to do this, so to give credit where credit is due, you’d want to also check out Shamekh Bluwi, an architect and fashion illustrator living in Jordan, who shows off the potential for women’s dresses with his very intricate cut-outs.
But besides these just being a fun bit of illustration to admire, I was thinking the cut-out-and-view-through process could be an excellent springboard or tool set to help you work out your own polymer designs. You can take sketches you have (or make copies of them) and cut out the essential mass of the design, then hold it up to various colors and textures. I just got my pack of Tracy Holmes’ Colour Cards today and placing a cut-out over selected solid-colored cards would be so much more telling than just holding them up to a sketch. Don’t you think?
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Trace a favorite form or shape, cut it out so you have a stencil, then take it on a walk with a camera of some kind. Hold it up to various colors, textures, patterns, etc. as you go. Take photos of what you find. Go home and put those photos up on a bigger screen and save or print out the ones you really like. Now … can you create artwork from what you found in that empty space in the stencil?
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Outside Inspiration: Elemental Variation
January 15, 2016
Inspirational Art
Sometimes the thing that binds a varied set of art or craft work is not visual elements but the concept they encompass.
The spoons here, created by Jacques Vesery, are bound by the fact that they are spoons, naturally, but every detail beyond that makes them look so different, including the fact that it appears each spoon could be made from different materials, or by different artists even. Of course, they are by the same artist and they are all the same material–carved wood.
The binding concept here is nature and its broad elemental categories, but not the traditional Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire. Rather, Jacques combines the idea of nature with a bit of myth. The spoons are titled, from left to right, “Barking at the Moon”, “Fair Tales”, and “Seaspoon”. I like that the sea is red for a change, perhaps to convey the energy of the ocean, with the idea more directly conveyed in the undulating and repeated lines.
His work originally caught my eye because I thought it could be polymer. I think many of you will find his beautiful forms and the delicacy of his carvings quite inspiring. You can find more of his work on his website.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Choose a concept and use it to design and create variation between the elements in a single item or in a series. Sketch or write out your ideas if you do not have time to create.
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Variation Within
January 13, 2016
Inspirational Art
In Monday’s blog post, we looked at how changing up a few elements in a design can change the entire feel of a piece. Variation from one similar piece to the next can push your creativity, but if you want something that challenges you even more, try variation in every element of a single piece of art you create.
That is what Ford and Forlano did here, with each bead different from every other one in the set. Because every piece has a common design element–that being an elongated bulls-eye–we see them as belonging together despite the fact that there are no two slices alike in one earring and they are not even arranged the same between the pair. The wide variation in color and size of the bulls-eye center achieves cohesiveness through its constant variety as well as the common shape.
Perhaps Ford and Forlano successfully control variation so well because they themselves are a mix, being two people living in two different states but collaborating to create their art. Each has their own strengths and interests, and they combine their efforts, skills, knowledge, and interests to create beautiful and intriguing pieces. You can see their most recent projects, as well as learn more about what they do and how they do it, by visiting their website.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Sketch or create a piece from new or already created components where every element is different except for one aspect. Remember that one common thing can be any design element–size, shape, color, texture, motif, etc.
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Variation by Numbers
January 11, 2016
Inspirational Art
So, how has everyone been doing on New Year’s resolutions and new challenges? I have been keeping up with my sleep and exercise (but just barely), however, I only managed to do 2 of the 3 challenges that were posted last week. I have to admit that it makes me feel like this is just too much, but just because something doesn’t go quite right does not mean you shouldn’t keep trying. So, I am going to keep trying. And I will get that Flickr page up, too. I will let you know when it’s good to go and I hope you will all post results of your personal challenge pieces, whether you are following mine here or your own.
I thought I’d throw out an easy idea today. Variation. One of the best ways to nudge your creativity is to simply change things up. These pendants by Natasa Hozjan Kutin show you how an oblong design can be switched up by changing just a couple things. In this case, she changes color, texture, the shape of the forms, how many elements are layered, and the size of the layered forms. They are small changes but they make a big difference in the feel of each piece.
Inspiration Challenge of the Day: Create a piece of an element you have already created but change 3 things about it such as form, color, line, texture, image, size, motif … just three easy changes. Keep good design in mind when you make those changes or listen to your intuition. Don’t be blindly random. Create something you like.
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Found Inspiration
January 8, 2016
Inspirational Art
Speaking of found objects and nostalgia (we did a bit of that on Wednesday if you missed it), here is a piece I’ve had in my folder to share for quite some time. It’s an older piece by Chris Kapono and, no, the fish is not made of polymer but rather is cloisonné while the other sea creatures are brass and the big shiny blue baubles are glass. But the rest is polymer.
I don’t know if the fish was something nostalgic for Chris, but this is a wonderful example of letting something you have held onto inspire a beautiful creation. Yes, we may call ourselves polymer artists, but that should never make us feel restricted to working with just polymer. Chris certainly could have made the fish and other items from polymer, but it would give it a different feeling even if the non-polymer objects were really closely replicated.
Yes, polymer can imitate just about anything, but that doesn’t mean it should. If you have another material that will do the job or will do it even better, don’t hesitate. Creating is not about medium loyalty, it’s about expressing yourself. In the best work, the medium almost always is secondary to the image and emotion you create. Be loyal to your self-expression first, I say.
Inspiration Challenge of the Day: Go to your junk drawer, that box of broken jewelry, or those tins of bits and bobs filled with things you felt you might use someday, and pull out an object you don’t need or use. Add it to something you haven’t finished yet. If the unfinished work is polymer or another craft medium, find a way to attach and integrate it. If you have an unfinished sketch or painting, you can draw it in. If you have nothing unfinished, take some artistic idea you haven’t explored yet and try to meld it with this object in any manner you please.
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The art jewelry at these events is also a big draw. There is nothing quite like seeing masterful polymer work in person.
Here is a gorgeous piece by Bonnie Bishoff. She wore it to the final gala event and I just could not stop looking at the delicate forms and sunset-like colors. The picture (and the poor lighting in these places) doesn’t quite do it justice.
Another bonus to coming to these events is the local color. In this case, Sherman Oberson, a board member of the IPCA and a local Pennsylvania resident, treated a small handful of us to a tour of his insanely packed and ever-entertaining collection of flea market and thrift store finds. We did this, in part, to honor Nan Roche whose birthday it was. A huge collector of the curious and visually enticing herself, it was a perfect birthday outing for her and an immensely entertaining evening for those of us who got to tag along.
Poke around on Instagram and Facebook for more on Sherman’s place and other Synergy events.
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Exploring technique and design doesn’t ever end, or at least I don’t think it should. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been working with a material, there is always more to learn. Barbara McGuire is a true and long standing polymer pioneer who may often return to signature techniques but she keeps expanding on what she has done, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in big leaps.
This collection of beads is one of her subtler explorations. Barbara has been making face canes for ages but she keeps changing up what she does with them. The angelic looking collection here gets its ethereal feel from the use of translucent wings and background cane slices. Past variations were commonly surrounded by opaque slices and balanced or radial backgrounds. The more freeform application here adds to the otherworldly feel of these little angels.
Barbara posts most of her recent work on her Facebook page while her products and news can usually be found on her website.
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Looking over a collection of work can tell you quite a bit about an artist and what intrigues them. The posts this week will give us a chance to consider, in a more complete and varied way, what an artist might be doing or be after in particular types of work.
Carole Monahan-Kampfe recently posted some rather intriguing pieces in what she refers to as her Steampunk collection but instead of jewelry, it looks like we are seeing a lot of ornaments. We are looking at Swellegant treatments (click the ad link below for more on this fascinating stuff) which make for some very yummy textures but the various shapes and variation on an ornament is what is most captivating about this work.
Although she is calling it steampunk and the influence of that aesthetic is there, many of the common motifs are, gratefully, missing and we can enjoy the exploration of the surface treatment and the manipulation of the ornament forms. I love the negative space in the ones with the floating centers and then those forms that are folding in on themselves which she calls Infinity Orbs. No standard ornament forms here either. Carole actually looks to be taking not the motifs and objects from the Steampunk arena but rather the inventive nature it is supposed to be representative of. Regardless, the choice of shapes and decorative touches are beautiful and more so in a collection like this where the various take on the elements and forms can be compared and contrasted.
The orbs at least, she lists as being made with Makin’s clay which is an air dry clay, rather than polymer but this could all be done with polymer as well of course. Carole just likes to try all kinds of things out as you can see on her Flickr photostream–another method of looking at an artist’s collection of work and over time at that. In this collection though, she seems to have really hit her stride and I hope she keeps playing with these ideas.
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Another way to push the disk element in strung jewelry design is to create designs on those inside surfaces. This might push you to design the disks in such a way as to open up space between them so that the work on the inside could be seen. That might present a bit of a challenge but it will likely present some interesting options for added accents and forms.
Margit Bohmer did just that. Her solution to show off the intricate and highly colorful faces of her disks was to slightly dome them and have them stacked in pairs with the concave sides in, allowing an angled view to all the beautiful color and textures she worked into them. It looks like quite a bit of work too. I just love seeing this kind of dedication and commitment to a piece. Each bead face is different and could stand on its own but all together, they create an engrossing piece that will probably take the owner years to become familiar with all its varied surfaces.
A riot of color and texture is a signature of Margit’s and she never leaves us wanting for more of either. See her latest work on her Flickr photostream.
Weekly Inspiration Challenge: Choose a basic or commonly used design and push it. By sketching, planning, or just playing with your materials, change the form or the way this basic design is constructed as far as you can until you come up with something that intrigues and excites you then create your own original work from the ideas you came up with.
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Let’s move on from the ‘ordinary’ disk necklace and really push what these could be. First of all, who says they need to be round? Or strung on their center sitting neatly one on top of the other? Well, no one, that’s who.
Silvia Ortiz de la Torre goes completely off the disk reservation by squaring off the standard disk necklace element and taking full control of their positioning. This necklace is getting so far from a disk that I bet some of you are thinking it’s not a disk necklace at all. And maybe not but the stacking and repetition of form is the same and this is a good example of where an idea might start with some common or basic design and really veer off in very exciting directions, ending in a place barely recognizable from where it started. I don’t know that Silvia started with the idea of disks but she could have. And so can you start from a well used (or over-used) form or basic design and end up somewhere quite different. The thing is, it would have been hard to get to that cool and very original design without that common or basic starting point.
This piece is several years old but Silvia still loves disks and stacking but she is taking things in a very different direction these days. See how she has journeyed from pieces like this to her big intricate disks display in her Flickr photostream and her Etsy shop.
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Disc beads are fantastic for the complexity they can create just by sheer numbers. They also pull the design away from any one bead and put the focus on how they work together. Employing Skinner blends to create the series of well-arranged colors on this necklace, Spain’s Carmen Morente del Monte, develops a rather striking look with the common stacked disk necklace design as the basis for her composition.
It is not that we haven’t seen quite a few Skinner disc arrangements but this one is rather intriguing with its wide array of colors that still somehow conveys a sense of quiet coherence. I believe that is primarily due to the muted, natural tone of the colors. Their thick spacers subtly echo the surrounding color while their variations trail off to long stacks of warm grays. I think the choice of gray rather than black or white or simply more of the colorful blends for the back half of the bead string is actually what makes this piece work so well. The gray creates a kind of neutral background for the colors to contrast with but the contrast is a gentle one which is also echoed at points in the front beads where the blends go to gray.
I was just having a conversation this weekend about how people steer away from anything well used believing their work won’t be appreciated unless it’s wholly original but how far from the truth that is. Doing something really, really well, even when it has elements seen many times before, is a far bigger and more difficult accomplishment than striving for something purely original. I think this necklace is just such an example.
You can find more of Carmen’s well thought out pieces in her Etsy shop and her Pinterest boards.
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To round out this week’s quick focus on beads, I thought I’d share focal beads in another medium that is very well-known for them–glass.
Glass artists have some very particular and, literally, inflexible limitations and yet they create these extremely intricate and amazing beads. They do get to work with super clear transparency–a characteristic of their medium that they use to great advantage–which is something that is difficult to achieve in polymer, but their forms and patterns are something that, I think, could be a gold mine of inspiration and a jumping off point for ideas in polymer that go beyond the basic and common beads seen in polymer.
Here are just four examples of the intricacy and beauty in glass bead making today. Starting from top left is a bead created by Leah Nietz, top right is Lisa Fletcher, bottom left is Andrea Guarino, and bottom right is Ikuyo Yamanaka. You can click on each artist’s name to reach their shop or website to look further into what they create. You can also immerse yourself in glass focal beads by putting that very phrase into a Pinterest, Google Images, Etsy, Flickr, or even Instagram.
Weekly Inspiration Challenge: Choose your favorite image posting service, such as those just listed above, and enjoy the art and inspiration that comes up when you search for “focal beads”. Choose a couple of images and try to determine what you like best about the bead or beads and then figure out how to recreate those characteristics in polymer. Hopefully that leads you to some original and very fulfilling polymer bead explorations.
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How about just a little bead beauty from the consistently wonderful Sarah Shriver today while I amble down the road?
Six canes constructed into a cube that is both turned on its side and has had its corner’s tweaked makes for a beautiful simple bead design. Just those two changes to the upright and steady cube has created movement due to its relative instability, facing the world with but one point down, and direction since the slight sweep of the sides slides our eye out to the point of the cube corners and beyond. And let’s not forget the lovely lines of the canes themselves that add to both the movement and directing of the viewers eyes beyond the constrains of the cube.
Apparently, Sarah will be teaching this Celtic cane on the Alaska Polymer Clay Cruise, the “Clayditarod” coming up next month. I was not able to discern if spaces are left for what is certain to be an amazing polymer adventure but you can check out the details and query as needed on the cruise website here. And for more splendid Sarah Shriver work, jump over to her website here.
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This will be a simple, and hopefully simply delightful, week as I am traveling or in the midst of preparing to travel and will have to be brief. But I have had the idea of the ‘bead’ on my mind. That sounds pretty basic, I know, but for art jewelry, the bead–be it a simple, plain spacer or an extravagant focal piece–is the most common single element created and thus, has a pretty highly esteemed place in the world of adornment. So let’s take a closer look at some very well-considered and lovingly created beads.
These beauties are cane constructed by the ever clever Ivy Niles of iKandi Clay. Canes takes their place on center stage as well as energetically running around the circumference for an intricate and rather mesmerizing look.
If you are partial to either a well-done cane or intricate, take a break to look through Ivy’s her Etsy shop and her website.
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