Building on yesterday’s tutorial, we look at how France’s Anne-Sophie Bonnay tweaks her scrap stripes, gouging across them to create a woven pattern.
She enhances the effect by impressing the polymer with a fabric texture.
Anne-Sophie offers more items made from the scrap sheet on her web site.
She even uses the curly gouged out strings, pressing them onto a solid colored sheet to create an abstract pattern. Her imitation tiger’s eye pattern is another riff on this scrap stripe theme.
Crisp fall days make colors brights and simple masks funnier. Look at these new pins from Susan Hyde (she’s mostly on Facebook).
A flat oval polymer face with a circle cut out gets her started on completely silly faces. A few dots and strings of clay turn into crazily raised eyebrows, a moustache or a glob of hair. A slice of any old cane will work for eyes.
Don’t forget teeth or a tongue and everybody gets a pair of jump ring earrings. Perfect Halloween favors.
Start from scrap
As long as we’re going for easy and effective art, check out Debbie Crothers’ scrappy cane tutorial.
I learned a similar version from Carol Blackburn who tames the tutorial and turns the results into tidy stripes and precise geometrics. Any way you handle this tute, it’s a great one to have at your disposal.
Sometimes all we need is color to brighten our day. Today Ronit Golan’s stacks of midnight rainbow colors will do the trick. Hint: she adds dark blue to her usual 24 colors for this version.
The cutout disks are ready to slide into the extruder tube. Ronit combines the resulting shapes into canes. She offers her color and stacking advice for free in this post.
Find out what Ronit makes with the extruded results on her Flickr and Etsy sites. Give yourself a time limit before you check out her Pinterest page or you could happily wander for hours. She adds her accidents and brainstorms to Facebook.
David Forlano models his newest tube necklace. This version is spiked and curved with striped surfaces. Gouges carved out of the tubes reveal the inner contrasting colors of the tusk-like shapes.
Four layers of polymer claws make the piece bushy and lush and suitable for an African hunter…or a New Mexican artist in this case.
The new design will appear in Ford & Forlano’s upcoming shows.
We’ve had our spook on all week and Jane Priser’s alien takes us to the weekend in style.
Her latest cosmic creature is 15″ tall with colorful skin made of twisted polymer and painted glass eyes.
This Colorado nighttime artist calls her work visionary and fantasy. ” I have found that creating in the night hours allows me to harvest dream time,” she says. Lots of cats creep into the dreams of this former potter.
Here she is on Etsy and Flickr. Have a fantastic weekend.
Visionaries
Do you have your own vision for where you want to go with polymer?
Sign up for my premium weekend newsletter over at StudioMojo.org if you’re ready to take a more in-depth look at where your art and your community are headed, join us.
You may see a teapot where Layl McDill sees a fanciful chicken. It flew out of her studio as soon as it was finished.
Layl layers slices from her brightly patterned canes onto vases, pitchers, teapots and more. She piles on the color (see the in-process shot below), hoping to catch the viewer’s eye and inspire wonder.
In this issue of The Polymer Arts, Layl is one of four featured artists who approach polymer with whimsey and humor.
Put a couple of eyes on your fruits and veggies and suddenly they’re ready for Halloween. You can see how it works for Hawaii’s Kiva Atkinson and her miniature blood oranges.
“I enjoy making unusual things, from strange Tudor food, to ethnic cuisines, to cheeky mice doing naughty things. My imagination gets to run wild all the time!” she says.
This tray of miniatures ready for baking shows you how Kiva ran wild with her vegetables. There’s more on her blog and on Flickr.
Tonight’s the night
For those of you who love tools, bop over to Craftcast this evening (8:00 EST) for the free tool talk session. Save your seat by registering here (you’ll get the notes even if you can’t stay for the party).
Don’t look now but monsters are beginning to creep into the polymer pages online.
Melissa Terlizzi’s trio of Zombie Brooches: Accessories for the Wicked and the Undead (above) are very weird and wearable.
Melissa’s from Virginia and you’ll find her on Facebook.
Denise Baldwin (left) cooked up a batch of exotic creatures on Flickr. She’s identified herself as ODDimagination so this line of creepies shouldn’t be a surprise. She’s on Etsy. Denise is from Virginia too! Coincidence?
“Do you know the moment at night — right before you fall asleep? That’s when I sometimes get the best ideas. Last night — out of nowhere — that very detailed picture of an earring design popped up right in front of my inner eye….so I had to try it today. They’re in the oven right now,” said Bettina Welker in describing a recent polymer epiphany.
Georg Dinkel caught this photo of Bettina wearing her new creations at the recent Staedtler Fimo Symposium in Paris. Bettina’s cutout shapes are heavily textured and often stacked or moving.
She calls her series The Place In Between and perhaps this week your best ideas are hiding in some overlooked spot, just waiting for you to relax and accept them.
There’s a free Pin-to-Pendant Converter tutorial on Bettina’s revamped site in case your customers, like hers, want to wear their jewelry in various ways.
Peek at the polymer exhibit that began this week at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. The opening reception for Re-Visioning: New Works in Polymer at the H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art will be held next Thursday, September 18.
Gallery staff have posted snapshots of the works on Facebook as they arrived to get us excited.
Laura Tabakman’s On the Trail is a delicate installation of a field of blossoms that emerge from the floor and climb one wall.
You can see her sitting on the gallery floor arranging every petal in what turned out to be a 15-hour operation. She says of the show, “OMG, don’t miss it!”
Here you see Cynthia Toops’ So Much Yarn, So Little Time which includes tiny knitting needles that pierce one of the balls of imitative yarn wound in Cynthia’s fastidious micro style. At one time or another all knitters and artists have shared the sentiment of the piece.
The event is being held in conjunction with an October polymer symposium, labs, and (in)Organic exhibit at the nearby Racine Art Museum.
