Margit Bohmer chops, scratches, carves, gouges, and mutilates her polymer beads in the most delightful and enthusiastic ways. Her colors are exuberant.
“I especially like to make simple, rustic beads and ethnic-inspired jewelry. Krobo beads from Ghana and the gorgeous jewelry from Tibet are wonderful sources of inspiration,” she says.
Margit’s DaWanda shop and her Flickr pages show how her color palette has remained constant over the last few years while her techniques have gotten bolder and more energetic.
She shows us how beads can be flat and connected with different colors on the front and back. See how she links them into long chains and dangles them as earrings. She knows how to build drama with strips of polymer in vibrant colors. This one’s for sale in her Etsy shop.
Mary Anne Loveless has been working on conical bead designs for a while and they keep getting better and better. This Tribal Elegance set is alluring in its rythmically repeated stripes interspersed with graduated strips of color. A textured gold strip adds a highlight. Her colors lean toward autumn and you can scan through her work on Flickr.
And the winner is….
Mariona Salvadó wins the Flower Academy giveaway from Iris Mishly described in Monday’s post. Congratulations and thanks to Iris for her generous prize.
If you’re feeling bored with your round polymer beads see what Dimitra Chiamanta (DemiArti) is doing with hers. This Greek artist who now lives in the Netherlands, bisects her brightly patterned circles and inserts felt disks in the middle.
She also combines leather, silver, wool and other materials with polymer. When the skies are gray and the winter long, Dimitra uses polymer’s colors to remind her of sunshine and spring. She knows how to breathe new life into common shapes.
This exhuberant design approach shows up again and again in the New Label Project store photos in Amsterdam (it’s considered one of the city’s cool shops) that you can track on Facebook. Here’s Dimitria’s own FB page too.
Slovenia’s Klavdija Kurent limits her polymer color palette and concentrates on textures, twists and surface treatments that tease the eye and beg to be examined by hand.
EuroSynergy represents a new direction in polymer art and I’ll be explaining which direction we’re headed with the opening speech entitled Those who tell the stories rule the world. The promo photos show someone who looks like she knows her stuff. The secret is that I rely on you, dear readers.
Isn’t it time you took a chance too? If I go out on a limb with my predictions, you can surely join me on that limb by showing your art. You can enter your artwork in the IPCA Awards competition from now until mid-January. Here’s the how-to-apply information.
More fall colors from Russia’s Anna Krichevskaya. The rough texture matches the rustic pallete which is highlighted by scratches in the layered surface. Zoom in to feel the intensity.
I enjoyed this hip, arty, quick video of the Moscow market where Anna sells her wares. Except for the language, this footage could have been shot at art shows around the globe. Here’s Anna on Flickr.
Genevieve Williamson and her family were dropped off on a remote island in the South Atlantic for the summer (check out Saint Helena) and she’s recently returned to her rural Pennsylvania home. Her father installed a new skylight in her attic studio while she was away that may make you jealous.
Genevieve has taken the dust covers off her work table as she dives into work for a gallery show. Already you can see that her months of a simpler life have changed her approach to clay. These simple strands of tubing in subtle shades, shifting diameters and slim palettes may hint at what’s to come.
She’s also added some variations to her earring project that was featured in Polymer Clay Global Perspectives. Has your summer changed your work?
These convex discs from Page McNall are two sides of a pendent she was creating from a blended sheet of clay. Even though she doesn’t show the assembled piece, you can see the possibilities.
Page is working on more 3D pieces saying, “My goal is to make irregularly shaped holes and inscribe intricate designs.” You can see what she’s accomplished on Flickr.
She describes the process, “After I made the blend, I cut the circle and draped it over the copper form where I proceeded to cut the decorative holes and draw patterns. I dusted the entire surface with black embossing powder and cured it. After it cooled, I used 600 grit sandpaper while the clay was still on the copper form and added Renaissance wax to give a subtle shine.” Follow along on her step-by-step here.
Barcelona’s Sona Grigoryan offers much more than this handful of Manuscript Beads on her Flickr site. For these ethnic beads Sona transfers flowing text and historic Armenian images to clay and forms the beads from strips torn from the flat sheets of transfers.
Lately she’s been constructing hollow organic beads and wrapping them with fiber or fiber-like vines and pods. She even tries macrame in polymer.
You can watch her work move from beads to sculpture to fiber and then to a combination of all three. She’s not finished with her experiments so we’ll visit often. Here she is on Facebook.
Carol Simmons and Rebecca Watkins are sharing the fruits of their recent collaborative work with you!
Carol wanted to experiment with big polymer beads and Rebecca wanted them lightweight and textured. Rebecca came up with an ingenious solution to make them hollow. Paper!
Since paper’s burning point is 451° Fahrenheit, it works as an armature for polymer. Rebecca researched and redrew various shape templates, printed them onto cardstock, cut them out, and taped each shape together. The constructed forms were covered with a thin layer of polymer (see the black forms in this picture) and baked.
Carol and Rebecca covered the baked forms with slices of kaleidoscope canes. Rebecca incised deep lines into Carol’s densely patterned canes. They tried a variety of methods – deeply or lightly textured, highlighted with dark powder (see Rebecca’s project in Polymer Clay Global Perspectives) or not, covered in sheets of pattern or with small sections. Each test bead was then rebaked.
Here are her shape files for you to download free, print and play with. “They are free because I did not invent geometry!” says Rebecca. Still, it was generous of the duo to share their secrets. Thanks to them we have another great way to create hollow forms with polymer.
