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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yesterday we spiraled extrusions around an egg. Today we watch Germany’s Jana Lehmann (Feeliz) as she winds around the centers of her series of Spiral brooches.
The colors blend into each other as the layers build. White dots and black and white accents provide a diversion from the strong colors.
Jana’s debuted a series of graphic dolls that are also decorated with spirals made of subtly blended colors.
You can catch Jana on Facebook and Flickr. Don’t miss the pen/pendants before you go spinning off to your weekend.
And if you’d like an even closer look at what happened in polymer clay art this week, join us over at StudioMojo for the inside scoop in the weekend newsletter.
If you’ve been resisting the whole Easter egg thing, the eggs from Russia’s Tatiana Parshikova (SeventhHeaven) may change your mind.
Mix your palette and load up the extruder. Spiral the the strings of extruded clay and let yourself snake around and doodle in the in-between spaces.
Tatiana knows how to create drama with her striking colors. PCD has featured her before here and here.
Take a closer look at the accents and inclusions on Tatiana’s Instagram. It’ll be fun and a lot less calories than a chocolate rabbit.
What would you pick if money were no object and you found yourself transported to a Ford/Forlano booth? What would you choose?
Here’s my pick, a Stacked Pin made of polymer and sterling. It measures 2 3/4 x 4 3/4 x 1?.
The brooch’s graphic elements are filled with echoes of the old CityZenCane work from the 90’s. So it’s a combination of sentimental and trendy.
What would you choose and why? It’s an interesting fantasy/exercise. Their site plus Facebook and Pinterest are well stocked. Go shopping!
And if you really do want to shop, they’re set up at the ACC St. Paul craft show April 6-9. You’ll find Lindsay Locatelli and Betsy Baker there as well.
