Coincidental polymer art

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.

Wise polymer

The Czech Republic’s young Dana Phamova (Fruitensse) greets you with a charming little owl. Dana’s always been a whiz with color and now she’s totally taken with texture.

You’ll see that she works like most of us, in the few remaining uncluttered inches on our work surfaces. She blames the owl for her messy desk.

You may want to study Dana’s heavily textured earrings and her shimmering series of dangles. She updates most regularly on Facebook and you can also find her on Flickr.

Read about how Dana founded the online Polymer Clay Heaven, a series of 18 tutorials by Czech artists.

Sleight of hand in polymer

Italy’s Cecilia Leonini plays an optical trick as she tinkers with the illusions created by painter Victor Vasarely. Could she create a 2D piece with a 3D effect by using color and hand cut lines?

What you may think are beads at the left are quite flat pieces of polymer colored and grooved to fool the eye.

Cecilia’s teaser may give your brain a Monday stretch. Follow her tricks on Flickr, Etsy and Facebook.

Bowled over

Sometimes it’s good to get nervous about trades among friends and, guess what, we all do it. That mixture of fear and competition can motivate us to try harder.

Even longtime artist and Sculpey brand ambassador Syndee Holt admits that this was her second attempt at making little 2 1/2″ diameter polymer bowls for an upcoming swap. She wanted to get her new design just right so she scrapped the first batch and kept going until she felt comfortable. Let the guessing begin about how she achieved this multi-color stone-like effect.

Kim Arden’s tell-all

In the September/October issue of Polymer Cafe magazine, Kim Arden reveals how she creates her summer flower pendants. Along with a profile written by Trina Williams, Kim includes a complete tutorial.

She shows how to stack bright and translucent cane slices over a scrap background to build pendants that have color, depth and attitude. Here’s PCD’s first look at Kim’s design from last year.

Read more about Kim on Facebook and her site. See what Syndee’s experimenting with on her blog and on the Sculpey site.

Phone to polymer

Colored laser transfers are popping up again on all kinds of shapes. France’s Sonya Girodon transferred some favorite image patterns onto square beads to create these fetching earrings.

Then Australia’s Wendy Jorre de st Jorre (who is a caner at heart) couldn’t resist putting her dogs on her arm using transfers draped over domed oval bases to create a graceful and heartfelt bracelet.

Wendy was following Debbie Crothers’ nicely presented CraftArtEdu tutorial which shows how to shape the beads and add spatters and bits of sparkle.

With all the images we’re accumulating on phones and cameras it’s great to come up with ways to put our photos to use.

See more of Sonya on Pinterest, Flickr and Facebook. Catch Wendy on Facebook, her site, Pinterest and in this interview on Blue Bottle Tree.

Sombre Wednesday

Lina Takhautdinova (Wildhorn) introduces us to the world of dark dressers and stylenoir. Goth meets high fashion in St. Petersburg. Lina pairs upcycled leather, coarse fabric, and aged silver with her own polymer antlers and imitation stones.

She refers to her colors as sombre and you’ll note hashtags that range from avantgarde to postapocalyptic. A short interview on StyleNoir.com gives you a better idea of Lina’s aesthetic and worklife. The best place to see her work is on Instagram and Pinterest. Keep up with her latest news on Facebook.

If you were overwhelmed by the color on Monday and Tuesday’s PCD posts, this should cleanse your palette.

Semi-lenticular polymer

Madrid’s Silvia Ortiz de la Torre combines her Semi-Lenticular creations into a bright bangle. The half-dome is one of Silvia’s favorite forms.

On her Flickr site you can see how she has used this shape to make other jewelry pieces.

For the new creation she covers a half-dome base with precisely positioned thick cane slices. The halves zig and zag against each other to form a round bracelet.

Silvia sticks to a bright color palette in most of her work. The variety comes from changing the shapes, folding and texturing beads to fit together in new ways. She used these three domes as decorative window blind pulls.

See more pictures of the bangle on Facebook. You can also follow her on Etsy and her blog.

Psychedelic Monday

These Greek trees by Arieta Stavrodou are quirky polymer drawings (wall art) that make you wonder what what the vegetation really looks like.

The effect is psychedelic and starts Monday on an energetic note. Do you detect a Hundertwasser influence?

And would you guess that those colors are from pastels or inks? Arieta offers a smattering of work on Pinterest with the rest on Facebook.

Her fish, birds, butterflies and shells hint at an outdoorsy girl who lives close to the water. Let me know if you find more clues about this promising, young artist.

Match and mismatch

This picture from Sylvie Peraud’s sketchbook stirs up feelings of admiration touched with jealousy.

Isn’t this how you meant to work? Draw your idea and then render it in polymer? Yeah, that’s how we mean to work but it doesn’t always work out that way.

Sylvie shows us the results of her careful planning in this earring design. She drew the suspended pod (it began as a pin) and colored it in weeks later.

You’ll be relieved to know that even with this level of intention, Sylvie had to modify the earring to make it hang properly.

She worried about making two matching pieces and (if I’m translating correctly) opted for the second earring to be a post design. She admitted in an earlier blog post about how she spends too much time on Pinterest. (So she’s not too different from the rest of us.)

Enjoy this look over Sylvie’s shoulder and see more of her work on Flickr and Facebook. Learn more from her on CraftArtEdu.

Polymer divas

These Diva Dolls from Barbara McGuire turn into pendants, pins or framed art. What a simple yet evocative use of faces! It’s one of her favorite classes and part of a series she’s teaching in North Carolina in August.

Barbara’s works have a loose and flowing ethereal look. Even her mokume gane stands out as distinctly hers with graceful lines, thin layers, glints of metal leaf and sophisticated colors. She calls hers Intentional Mokume and will be teaching that in August as well.

Barbara worked in polymer industry for years and wrote 10 books so she has an eye for good tools.

She developed her own line including some ingenious measuring designs and hand drawn patterns made into deep rubber stamps which she sells online.

Maybe it’s Barbara’s ease with polymer after years of experience that comes through in her pieces. Go see for yourself on Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest and YouTube.

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