Black and white for drama

Heather Powers (HumbleBeads) will be showing these new lentil beads in her trunk show on Facebook on Friday at noon. Black makes a dramatic background for the layers of flowers over the crackled gold leaf. The bits of white pop forward.

You can see how the layers enhance the impression of depth when they’re set in bezels here. The beads will also make their way to Heather’s Etsy shop.

Friday tidy

Have you checked out Claysino June 2-4, the first Staedtler (fimo) event this side of the pond?

May 2 is just around the corner. That’s the deadline for shipping your works for the Into the Forest exhibit. How often do you get the chance to be part of an international exhibit? Grab it!

And join up with us on StudioMojo for the rest of this week’s story.

Visible projects

Elizabeth Wood chose the word “visible” for 2017 as she committed to completing 10 larger pieces during the year.

She describes April’s bowl as Deconstructed Polymer. It’s a macrame mix of polymer and waxed cord that she had fun making even though it took more time than she anticipated.

Hundreds of slices of clay with striped edges sprout from the sides of the bowl. You can see her progress this year on Instagram. You can also see the changes she went through during her journey through making 365 beads.

Her project is indeed making Elizabeth more visible!

Balanced bowl and a TP trick

Boston’s Betsy Baker was pushing hard to get ready for the St. Paul ACC show last week. She gave herself a little diversion from jewelry production to make a series of ring bowls which share the same grunge-meets-elegant aesthetic. The copper colored lining on this one plays nicely against the concrete-like exterior.

If you look at Betsy’s Instagram, you can see how she loads her post earrings into the oven. Wouldn’t you guess that those are toilet paper rolls that have been flattened and pierced with holes for the posts?

Her improvised holder allows her to fire the front of the earrings and hold them upright so that any back details are baked at the same time. When you’re preparing for shows, every time-saving trick helps.

Simple geometry in polymer

Barcelona’s Florence Belliard (flo’touch) brings calm and sophisticated stripes to her Helios pendant. Randomly striped veneers in muted colors circle around the center of this cutout.

Florence samples all kinds of treatments and finishes on her Flickr pages. It’s when she tackles geometry that she hits a sweet spot. Her circles, stripes and squares have a harmony about them.

Go see for yourself on Flickr and Facebook.

Flowery polymer teapot

Florida’s Pamela Carman makes a flowery pot of tea on a spring Monday.

A visit to her Flickr site shows you the vases, bottles, pots, birdhouses and fish shapes that she covers with polymer.

Usually she uses hundreds of slices of small canes to build her images. Her stash of neatly stored small canes makes us caners envious.

But for today’s teapot on her Instagram she grows a garden out of layers of larger textured circles and leaves.

Is there a bottle in your kitchen that wants to be covered?

Hippity hoppity Nambi eggs

Serbia’s Nevenka Sabo covers this year’s eggs in polymer using a twist on her special Nambi technique.

Think of it as African art meets Zentangles meets Ukranian pysanka eggs.

Instead of being covered with ethnic images, these updated eggs have a distinctly modern vibe rendered in punchy colors.

Let’s hope your Easter basket is overflowing with trendy hippity hoppity goodies.

If you’d like a more in-depth look at what’s happening in polymer art this spring, come join us for this week’s edition of StudioMojo.

A polymer builder

Croatia’s Nikolina Otrzan loads her shapes with rough textures and subtle colors. These square earrings are an outgrowth of her boxes, tubes and cubes series. Short sections of dark tubes line up into squares.

Seems very simple but Nik goes to great lengths to construct her pieces, paying attention every detail. Now that she’s worked out her own tricks for hollow forms, she’s expanding the jewelry she makes from them.

A walk through her Flickr site or Instagram shows you how her designs are evolving. Her tutorials contain scads of photos that explain every step. She offers a handful of instructions on Etsy and classes on CraftArtEdu. Few polymer artists are as meticulous about how their work is built as Nikolina.

Beyond the brooch

At 14″ x 14″ x 3.5″, this multi-media piece from Santa Fe’s Tory Hughes is no brooch.

Skipping Over Winter Except the Solstice is a new work for the wall and it’s a small scale sample of a new and even larger series.

Tory’s works are always filled with echoes of travel and sprinkled with shimmer and hints of the East.

Her summer teaching schedule is filling up and she’ll take off for Australia to teach in September and October. You can travel along with her on Instagram, Facebook and her site.

Musical polymer

Leonini makes music on PolymerClayDaily.com

Look closely at the flipped up edges of the circles in Cecelia Leonini’s necklace. The curls tease and taunt us like the flip of a woman’s hem in an old movie. They offer a peek at something more.

Cecilia’s hot, bright colors come from growing up in Tuscany and living in Sienna, Italy. She taught piano for many years until she ran into a Skinner blend on the internet.

“I found in polymers the same vibrations, sounds and colors of the earth and music. For me the clay is the synthesis of all the arts that I love,” she says.

Cecelia offers an array of energetic, asymmetric jewelry on Flickr, Facebook and Instagram which she sells on FoltBolt and Etsy.

If your art made music, what would it sound like?

Spring finery in polymer

New polymer purses for spring from Kathleen Dustin appeared just in time for the Smithsonian Craft Show April 26-30. See the other new additions on her Instagram and Facebook. (David Forlano and Steven Ford will also be at the Smithsonian show.)

These designs continue a couple of Kathleen’s series. At the left is her Tribal Circus Purse that continues a combination of carved areas with bands of textile-like patterns.

Below is her Scratch Purse that has a more painterly feel with areas of sgrafitto and panels of patterns.

If you want a closer look at how Kathleen explores and experiments, sign up for her class at Metalwerx (Boston) in May or CreativeArtsFest (Laurel, MD) in June.

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