The footed boxes are heartfelt tokens made as gifts for family members. Small, humble artworks can still strike a chord in the hearts of online fans. Thousands were amazed at what could be done with polymer. The link came to PCDaily from Society of American Mosaic Artists trustee Sharon Plummer.
These convex discs from Page McNall are two sides of a pendent she was creating from a blended sheet of clay. Even though she doesn’t show the assembled piece, you can see the possibilities.
Page is working on more 3D pieces saying, “My goal is to make irregularly shaped holes and inscribe intricate designs.” You can see what she’s accomplished on Flickr.
She describes the process, “After I made the blend, I cut the circle and draped it over the copper form where I proceeded to cut the decorative holes and draw patterns. I dusted the entire surface with black embossing powder and cured it. After it cooled, I used 600 grit sandpaper while the clay was still on the copper form and added Renaissance wax to give a subtle shine.” Follow along on her step-by-step here.
Barcelona’s Sona Grigoryan offers much more than this handful of Manuscript Beads on her Flickr site. For these ethnic beads Sona transfers flowing text and historic Armenian images to clay and forms the beads from strips torn from the flat sheets of transfers.
Lately she’s been constructing hollow organic beads and wrapping them with fiber or fiber-like vines and pods. She even tries macrame in polymer.
You can watch her work move from beads to sculpture to fiber and then to a combination of all three. She’s not finished with her experiments so we’ll visit often. Here she is on Facebook.
Carol Simmons and Rebecca Watkins are sharing the fruits of their recent collaborative work with you!
Carol wanted to experiment with big polymer beads and Rebecca wanted them lightweight and textured. Rebecca came up with an ingenious solution to make them hollow. Paper!
Since paper’s burning point is 451° Fahrenheit, it works as an armature for polymer. Rebecca researched and redrew various shape templates, printed them onto cardstock, cut them out, and taped each shape together. The constructed forms were covered with a thin layer of polymer (see the black forms in this picture) and baked.
Carol and Rebecca covered the baked forms with slices of kaleidoscope canes. Rebecca incised deep lines into Carol’s densely patterned canes. They tried a variety of methods – deeply or lightly textured, highlighted with dark powder (see Rebecca’s project in Polymer Clay Global Perspectives) or not, covered in sheets of pattern or with small sections. Each test bead was then rebaked.
Here are her shape files for you to download free, print and play with. “They are free because I did not invent geometry!” says Rebecca. Still, it was generous of the duo to share their secrets. Thanks to them we have another great way to create hollow forms with polymer.
Amy Christie is a maker and a mom. She offers a quick free tutorial on how to transfer kids art to polymer, add magnets and make what I think of as a refrigerator shrine.
Darling doodles and sweet scribbles deserve to be kept as a reminder of innocence and pure play.
When I said that my grandson’s drawings looked like Willem de Kooning’s work, my daughter-in-law rightly said that the reverse was true. De Kooning worked hard to recapture the grace of children’s brushstrokes, color and composition. We’re all trying to get back to our unaffected, free selves.
Inspired by scenes from the video game, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, this mostly polymer sculpture from Tucson’s Camille Young stands 5″ x 15″.
The piece, entitled Cross Section, was created for the Fangamer X Attract Mode show in Seattle. Video gamers love seeing their 2D characters brought to life in 3D by Camille and her sculpture represents a kind of modern shrine.
The Animal Crossing game allows players to build their own happy places and make the decisions that shape their lives.
These concepts may be completely foreign to us non-gamers but the audience for this artwork is huge and growing. Read about Camille in Polymer Clay Global Perspectives to get a glimpse of how and why this art is so important. She offers a 3D project for you to try.
Camille’s been sidetracked by her 6-month old daughter and it’s great to see her working (after Iris is in bed) again. Sample more of her work on Flickr and Facebook.
Wendy Moore’s triptych is made from an discarded dart board upcycled with papier mache and polymer. It’s entitled Chautara which means resting place in Nepali. “This is a resting place for me; a place to reflect, meditate and reground,” says Wendy. See more of Wendy’s works on Flickr.
The shrine is part of her month-long show at the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery in Australia. Her works highlight the contrasts of living in the Outback and her frequent travels to Nepal where Wendy teaches women to create jewellery and objects to sell, enabling them to escape lives of poverty, trafficking and abuse.
Donations from the polymer community have helped the Samunnat project begin construction on a permanent home. Here’s their Etsy shop and their U.S. outlet on Kazuri West.
This week’s shrines show what potent places triptychs can be. Are you beginning to plan yours?
Sing in me, muse, and through me tell a story.
– The Odyssey
Mari O’Dell and Barb Harper enshrine their skills
Let yourself become living poetry.
Maryland’s Mari O’Dell, teacher, and Colorado’s Barb Harper, airplane mechanic, combined talents for this portable personal shrine. As you might expect, Barb engineered the hinges, the rod for the prayer wheel and other structural parts. Mari concentrated on the poetry and the imagery.
Neither would have accomplished such a complex and powerful polymer piece on her own and their success has prompted them to continue their collaboration. Two heads are often better than one.
Denver’s Rosemary Probst insists on calling me Cindy (no one calls me that). When I taught her my latest polymer rock technique, she insisted on putting rhinestones in her version. Rosemary loves to taunt me in the most delightful ways.
This three interlocked circle pin that Rosey created is simple, clever and fashionable. Discussions about taking your work to the next level have netted results for her. Many of Rosey’s works are sold to support cancer research and Facebook is as far as she ventures into technology.
We all know artists like this who don’t seek fame but have happy hands that bring joy to our community. Surely after this post Rosey will stop calling me Cindy. Have a happy weekend.
Do you use your lap as your easel? At the retreat, Heather Campbell’s work space was crowded with the ephemera she used in her mixed media work plus tools and glue and wire and such. So she worked on her lap. She wisely wore an apron.
You had to wonder how the iron trivet, table knives, rhinestones, dolls and other repurposed items would fit on this 12″ x 12″ canvas. The trivet made an interesting design element but on my next visit, it was buried beneath polymer, paint and ornate trim.
Old table knives took on a new life wrapped in polymer and treated to a coat of paint with metallic highlights. More is much better in Heather’s vocabulary. This piece is entitled Peace Making.
Heather’s sumptuous style belies the unvarnished messages buried beneath her avalanche of ornamentation. See her sales page on Artful Home and her blog here.
