Tamara Shea (BlockPartyPress) is thinking ahead to Easter and Mother’s Day with her personalized nest necklaces.
The colored woodblock look runs throughout her polymer collection on Etsy and she’s racked up an impressive number of sales with her signature pieces. Her fans can glimpse what’s ahead on Instagram. You’ll also find her on Facebook and Twitter.
Tamara’s consistent style, quality and online strategy are some of the secrets to her success.
This butterfly bush (more pix here) is a group project from the polymer clay students at the Ohio Reformatory for Women for the Into the Forest exhibit.
The clay came from generous artists who were destashing. (The ORW students are happy to condition old polymer. Let me know if you’re cleaning out and have extra clay.)
They created 27′ of big hole beads that were slipped onto brass rods and inserted into a wooden base made by my husband. The brass rods couldn’t be taken into the facility so we had to visualize the piece and assemble it at home. I’ll take the whole shebang apart to ship it off to Pittsburgh.
Will you be part of this international exhibit? The deadline has been extended to May 1.
You have plenty of time to make your mark on the fanciful forest that Laura Tabakman, Julie Eakes, Emily Squires Levine, Libby Mills and Nancy Travers concoct from your submissions.
The event opens in Pittsburgh in November with a teaser preview on view at Synergy4 in August. Are you tempted to make some beads to cheer up your own garden?
We gotta have a chat with Christi Friesen and find out what’s going so right in her life. She’s been churning out new ideas, following her bliss and coloring outside the lines for months.
Take these freeform bowls, for instance. Forget symmetrical half dome bowls. Christi stretches her polymer into shallow elongated irregular ovals. She draws her images of branches, leaves, and flowers and adds color with pastels or paints or whatever strikes her fancy.
Christi’s preparing samples for her upcoming Aloha Creative Hawaiian cruise. That would definitely improve your mood, wouldn’t it? She’s planning another one in 2019 so save your pennies.
You can see more of her brainstorms and samples on Instagram and Facebook.
Two artists have gone tubular for spring. Same thinking with very different outcomes from Austria’s Izabela Nowak and Pennsylvania’s Genevieve Williamson.
Izabela uses slim tubes in graduated purples formed into a 3D necklace. She has been experimenting for months with what she calls her Straw Technique.
Genevieve takes a more minimalist approach with long slender polymer tubes strung into a bright multi-color strand. “Is it too light?” she wonders on Instagram.
PCD will look at several new stringing, assembling, designing developments that have emerged recently. Looks are changing for spring!
Even if you won’t be traveling to the Czech Republic for Polymer Week 2017, July 2-8, you’ll want to take a closer look what the 15 teachers will be presenting. (Scroll to the bottom of their page.)
For example, these brooches from Spain’s Fabiola Perez Ajates pull you in with their layers, colors, patterns, textures, cutouts. So neatly and cleverly done!
Just when you think that your eyes have taken in all the details, you find another point of interest. Shapes that look easy and geometric turn out to be slightly askew. These visual surprise packages will be part of Fabi’s classes. She shares glimpses of her patterns and palettes on the group’s Facebook page as well as on her own blog and FB page.
Could your work benefit from another helping of surprise?
Florida’s Lorraine Vogel (WiredOrchid) brings us a springy look with her combination of layered surface techniques. If lightly layered beach motifs speak to you, Lorraine’s tutorials let you in on her methods
Whether it’s batiks, transfers or a mix of media and methods, Lorraine builds over a light clay, adding and subtracting until she reaches a tropical mix of color and shape.
Here’s her freebie tutorial on StencilGirl to experiment with. Lots of examples of her sun and sand on Etsy, Facebook. Flickr and Instagram.
Does it bug you when you can’t quite figure out how a piece was constructed? I am stumped by this pendant/bar/bead from Jana Honnerova and the Czech translation doesn’t help.
Blended and stamped veneer? Extruded interlocking patterns? Faux mosaic? Silkscreen?
What you can clearly understand is that Jana put a lot of time and skill into developing this brain-teaser pattern. She has a masters in biology/genetics and was a skateboard champion too.
Here’s her work on FB, Flickr and Etsy. Oh look, Jana will teach in Dallas in March!
In the meanwhile, let her design tease your polymer brain.
Johanna S (JS Creations) hits on all cylinders with this bright necklace that she calls Dust to Dawn. In the first place, the flat disks appear to have been cut from scrap clay (and we’re always chasing scrap clay ideas). And further, the colors are bright enough to warm the most wintry day.
So even though we don’t know who or where Johanna is, this simple necklace is a winner. She only shows up on Flickr. If you can unravel more of this mystery, let us know.
Meanwhile appreciate another cool use of leftovers.
Slovenia’s Marjana Cajhen shows how minimalist designs that aren’t technique-driven can delight us with openness and wearability. Thin graduated flat squares of polymer veneer are stacked on each other separated by tiny spacers.
If Marjana’s sensibilities mesh with yours, look at more of her work on Pinterest, FB, and her blog.
PCD is closing in on 3,000 posts and 300 weekly weekend StudioMojos. That shocking number paralyzed me temporarily on Friday and I took the day off to recover.This link from Lindly Haunani jarred me back into action.
The painterly backgrounds on these flower canes from Maine’s Jayne Dwyer accentuate the realistic flower images.
The backgrounds are not just Skinner blends, they are chunky blends of companion colors that blend into brush strokes and set off the main images.
You may be wowed by Jane’s realistic scenes in polymer on her sales site here and on Facebook. If want to see what inspires her, visit her Pinterest boards.
Be sure to look at her latest teapot to see how Jayne gives salvaged items new life by applying her slices to them.
