{"id":15876,"date":"2019-01-27T00:53:51","date_gmt":"2019-01-27T08:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepolymerarts.com\/blog\/?p=15876"},"modified":"2019-01-29T13:05:41","modified_gmt":"2019-01-29T21:05:41","slug":"creating-uncommon-mokume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepolymerarts.com\/blog\/creating-uncommon-mokume\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating Uncommon Mokume"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Question for you … how much do you know about the origination of mokume gane? I’m guessing you have heard it has something to do with swords but did you know that the original metal technique was a lost art until quite recently? And did you know that what we do with polymer today has virtually nothing in common with the original technique? Mokume’s history and our adaptation of it has quite a few surprises in it, many of which could really open your eyes to its possibilities.<\/p>\n

To understand how to create great mokume in polymer, it really does help to know a bit about where it came from, not to mention that its history is a great story of fortune, loss and redemption! Or something akin to that. Here are a few statements about its history. See if you can identify which statements are a true part of its tumultuous history and which are just fantastic claims:<\/p>\n

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  1. Mokume was a sword making technique that required folding metal over and over to give the blade\u2019s edge a rippled appearance, like wood grain.<\/li>\n
  2. The technique was developed for purely decorative purposes.<\/li>\n
  3. It was originally used almost exclusively to create samurai swords to be carried around as status symbols.<\/li>\n
  4. The technique became nearly extinct due to samurai swords becoming illegal to carry in Japan in the 19th century.<\/li>\n
  5. The technique was resurrected by a female Japanese metalsmith when she started teaching it in the US in the 1970s.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Ok, so as you might have guessed, all these statements are true! But how does knowing this help? Well, the history may be more about appreciating it’s path to polymer but how it is created in metal can help you understand how our version of it works and what you can do with it.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    Here \u2026 just take a look at one of the ways it is used in metalsmithing today. You can see in the phases of making a mokume ring, just how a mokume billet (that\u2019s what metalsmith\u2019s call a block of metal) is layered, twisted, pounded and bent into a ring. I never would have guessed that my mokume wedding band was created in this way considering how we approach it with polymer.<\/p>\n

    Now, what if you did the exact same thing with polymer? You could build a block, cut it, twist it, open it up and form it into a dimensional ring. Or bead. Or flattened donut. Or just a long bar bead, already patterned on all sides. Do you see how knowing the origin and how else it has been used can help you see the possibilities in polymer?<\/p>\n

    Neither the decorative sword nor the above metalsmithing approach sounds or looks anything like what we do in polymer though, does it?\u00a0We don\u2019t twist or even fold polymer mokume, it rarely looks like wood grain, and it certainly isn\u2019t going to behave (or be as hard to work with) as steel and yet, we call it mokume. Now, how did that happen?<\/p>\n

    Like most borrowed techniques, what most of us have come to think\u00a0 of as polymer mokume evolved from an attempt to emulate it so it is not just some kind of translation of the technique. Slicing polymer “billets” (it’s too cool a word not to borrow too!) emulated grinding down the metal edge of a sword to reveal the visual drama of its layers. But because polymer can be manipulated in so many other ways, and because artists are a curious and exploratory lot, the technique, along with the clay, was also manipulated. This happened over and over until we ended up with the many variations we have today and even those often have little in common but the layering and the slicing.<\/p>\n

    Creating Uncommon Mokume in Your Studio<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Has this started to get you thinking a bit differently about mokume? If it hasn’t let me just nudge you a bit more.<\/p>\n

    Consider this. With polymer, versus metal, we can:<\/p>\n