Polymer Clay Daily

Tips and Tricks

Secrets of the heart

galchen_orly_fuchs_hearts

Orly Fuchs Galchen pursues hollow polymer forms and she’s come up with light, bright empty hearts. Her Facebook  and Flickr pages and her Etsy shop are filled with examples in many styles including these wrapped with lovely bands of graduated color.

Orly swears that she only uses polymer. No filling with sugar, salt, paper, cotton or foil. No making two halves and gluing. No double baking. You have to buy her tutorial to learn her secret or be resigned to a heavy heart. (I couldn’t resist the pun.)

Making five easy pieces

McNall on PCDaily

Page McNall added a free 2-page photo tutorial on Flickr for her segmented polymer bead necklaces last month. Now that the holiday hubbub is over, let’s give her instructions a whirl. She shows how on page 1 and page 2.

She blends color gradients into short thick plugs which she threads onto on a knitting needle. She nurses and shapes the plug, removes it from the needle and cuts it into five segments.  She gently refines the shape of the cut pieces and places them back on the needle to bake.

mcnall_tutorial

After they’re baked Page distresses the beads and adds color accents with shoe polish. Mounted onto short lengths of wire, the segmented beads are then arranged into necklaces. Her pictures make it all quite clear. Follow Page on Facebook and see her influences on Pinterest. (PCD follower Patrice Pfeiffer thought you’d want to see this and I agreed.)

A polymer mashup

Holt on PCDaily

Syndee Holt calls last week’s free tutorial on the Sculpey site the Meisha Squish but doesn’t the Meisha Mash sound better? 

Syndee and Meisha Barbee devised this method as they sat at the same worktable cleaning up their scrap. It’s sloppy, fast mokume gane with the best colors (Syndee even provides the recipes) and easy steps.

What a way to ease us into the week! See Meisha’s polymer on her Pinterest site and Facebook. Here’s more from Syndee on her blog, Instagram and Facebook.

 

 

Bury your beads

Mayorova on PCDaily

As we approach our usual end-of-year studio pare down and purge period, we might take a hint from Spain’s Tanya Mayorova and bury our beads!

Tanya doodles with extruded strips of clay set on edge. Stacked against each other, the strips dip and bend and wind around an assortment of beads and baubles. They change color as they move along. The effect is like water flowing past pebbles in a stream.

Do you have some beads you love and can’t let go of? This collage of treasures might be just the thing. Look closely at Tanya’s methods on Etsy, Flickr, and Facebook (and in prior PCD features).

A tutorial under your tree

Lehocky on PCDaily

Dr. Ron Lehocky apologized for being late in sending PCD readers this free holiday tree tutorial. He explains that he’s been busy making over 1100 heart trees since November. He’s turned his signature heart upside down and added some bling in keeping with the season.

lehocky_frozen_blue_trees

Ron offers the tutorial as a thank you gift to the polymer community who have so wholeheartedly supported the heart project and the Fimo 50 effort which both benefit the Kids Center. He’s also celebrating having made 33,150 hearts. (Can you imagine?)

Ron extruded so much green polymer that he tired of the color and created a blue Frozen series of trees. They sold out quickly. Unwrap your present from Ron at this link. Follow him on Facebook where you can see his fans decked out fashionably in hearts.

Magpies collaborate

Lehocky on PCDaily

This new batch of Picarello/Lehocky hearts was too beautiful to pass by. Julie Picarello tidied her studio and forwarded those pesky tail ends and bothersome bits to Ron Lehocky.

Ron never met a polymer scrap he couldn’t use. Look at the lovely collaborative patterns that he melded into hearts (more here). He’ll peddle the pins for the Kids Center during Julie’s 2-day class in Indianapolis. Here are Ron and Julie on Facebook.

Picarello on PCDaily

The yellow pieces below are Julie’s samples for Magpie Mokume. In this version she adds leaf and inks and anything within reach into her stacks of clay colors.

 

Palette knife polymer

Stroppel on PCDaily

Florida’s Alice Stroppel smeared bits of polymer onto a glass pane placed over her sketch of a woman. She bakes right on the glass then removes it.

I wish I’d paid attention to the finer points of Alice’s palette knife process. The next time the small painting appeared it was dramatically matted and framed and artists were excitedly bidding on it.

Only go to Alice’s blog and Flickr and Etsy sites if you’re willing to be distracted and have time to jump into her world. She uses polymer in unusual and uncomplicated ways that beg to be tried.

Knots and ribbons

Veesuel’s Knots and Ribbons series are created using Sculpey’s Souffle clays which have a distinctive suede-like texture. Because Souffle is not sticky, patterns made with it can be manipulated in unusual ways to make ribbon-covered bracelets, rings and pendants.

“The idea was to simulate the feel and flexibility of fabric,” says Veesuel. She made the black and white curved base of regular Premo that she sanded and polished. Watch out, she’s got lots more ideas that you can find on Facebook and Pinterest.

The red, white and blue (well, purple) looks so festive that we’ll keep it around for the US Labor Day coming up! Thanks to Libby Mills for alerting us.

Coincidental polymer art

Watkins on PCDaily

Rebecca Watkins simplifies our Wednesday and reminds us that it’s still possible to create colorful, cheery, fashionable art by stringing big round polymer balls on a cable.

Artybecca’s beads are colored with dots of shared colors and textured with circles. A dark wash of paint brings out the lines.

The colors are “coincidental” (as she explains on her blog) and happen to match everything in her closet. She wears them here.

Nothing forced or fussy about this necklace. No laborious techniques. A smooth finish and a nice polish and they’re good to go.

Take a deep breath, lighten up on the expectations, and have some fun. See more of Rebecca on Facebook and Flickr. You may enjoy reading about how she “blew up” a perfectly good cane to get back to the big patterns she prefers.