How often do you see polymer clay on a billboard? Thanks to Meredith Ditmar’s work, folks in Portland have that pleasure. Meredith’s characters also appear in books, on cell phones, in commercials and in other unusual venues.

Interest in contemporary character design has grown. It draws on pop culture, graffiti and visual art and its artists have moved beyond the boundaries of the gallery and introduced polymer clay work to a new audience of avid collectors.

Take a look at the works of Fergus Ray-Murray (Oolong) from Scotland and Bulgarian Dinko Tilov, for example.

  • reply Kristy ,

    The Fergus Ray-Murray guy, I really like the brown and white cat with green eyes who is laying on it’s back. But I see alot of finger prints and dust particals. You should get some index cards to work on, then you can just pop the index card in the oven on top of you cookie sheet. Good luck!

    • reply Fergus Ray-Murray ,

      Yeah, I like the fingerprints! 🙂 Occasionally I make an effort to get rid of them, but I think most critters look better with fingerprints than they would totally smooth, so in those cases it makes more sense not to worry about it – although I should perhaps experiment more with different textures…

      For the most part, dust particles don’t bother me greatly either – in most cases cases they’re hardly noticeable at all until you take a photograph and blow it up to a couple of times the real size! It’s only when I’m working in very light colours that they bother me, as a rule, and the only ways I know to stop them being a problem then are to work in a virtually dust-free environment to begin with, or was the models with alcohol before cooking!

      For what it’s worth, I do most of my sculpting directly on a baking tray (which is never used for food) – it suits me very well!

      • reply Polymer Clay Daily » Dittmar’s Show ,

        […] If you want to know a bit about how Meredith works, read this article from an earlier Portland show. You’ll find information about this prolific artist all over the web including previous posts ( here and here) on PCDaily. […]

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