No-fear polymer fashions from Moscow’s Oxana Volkova. Her love of color extends from a headband bubbling with colors, textures and patterns to makeup that continues the artistry. Are those mokume gane lips?
Why not wear summer? Here are her bracelets, her mixed media, more of her fashion shoots.
Canada’s Claire Maunsell worked in hot glass for twenty years and she reflexively handles polymer as if it were hot and liquid. These beautiful hollow pods are created using a technique that Claire explains in the upcoming Global Perspectives book which is full of new names, exciting concepts and scads of pictures.
Artists who crossover from glass, textiles, ceramics and sculpture are perhaps the most exciting part of our global story.
While you wait (the book arrives in July), enjoy Claire’s rough yet sophisticated glass-meets-polymer work on her Etsy shop (where she’s busy adding items), her Zibbet shop, her blog and her Flickr pages.
Spring is the season for growing and there’s a promising crop of polymer tutorials popping up. Here are three that could broaden your options and save you lots of trial and error time.
Finishes are all the rage – ceramic, enamel, raku, crackle, batik. No new equipment is required, just pull out the inks, powders and tools that you probably already have on hand. These surface treatments could give your designs added oomph.
The tutorials’ authors are not the first to try these processes but each teacher has each come up with new twists and clever tricks that may make the information helpful for you. All are delivered electronically and some have videos. While they each offer projects that you can follow, applying these finishes to your own signature work is what will make the information valuable.
Hilla Bushari and Iris Mishly – Israel – Ceramic, stoneware, enamel finishes
Test samples from one student caught my eye and have me itching to play in the studio. Come back tomorrow to see. If you’ve found other interesting tutorials, let me know. The ones that I like to feature on PCD are those that offer new and/or easier ways to work with polymer.
If you’re a fan of distressed and worn pieces that look like they spent a previous life in a cottage, you’ll like Sandra DeYoung Niese’s polymer pendants and beads.
Sandra says the molded beads remind her of her grandmother.
She updates her romantic shabby look with bright contemporary colors. The highlights have been sanded off to expose dark colored polymer below. See more of her rustic line on Flickr, her Etsy site and on Facebook.
These scrap beads from Virginia’s Rebekah Payne (TreeWingsStudio) may give you new ideas for what to do with cane ends and leftover blends. Rebekah shows you how she chops and then rolls the leftovers in paint.
The free tutorial is part of a post she wrote on ArtJewelryElements. She gathers the painted bits into any pleasing bead shape. Then she facets the shapes, slicing off the top layer of paint to expose mosaic-like beads. See more examples in her Etsy shop.
Her method offers a more satifying use of wonky, useless pieces that would otherwise end up mixed into unexciting bead cores.
Clean up your studio and have mosaic beads to show for your effort!
Russia’s Maria Belkomor finishes our week of textures with her faux knitted polymer in soft colors. She sands the tops of her knitted circles (made from extruded strings) to unearth more colors, a sort of knitted mokume technique. The beads look like scraps salvaged from a faded favorite sweater.
Maria shares how she added bails to the backs of the beads and strung them on a suede cord with a button closure. The rustic closure adds to the easy, laid-back comfort of the piece. Have an easy weekend!
Continuing with textures, we move on to Pennsylvania’s Stacie Louise Smith who mixes lots of media into her jewelry – wire, stone, sea glass, metal clay, and polymer for sculptured pieces and faux fossils..
On the Love My Art group blog, she offers a picture tutorial of how she carves and shapes an original polymer focal piece and then duplicates it in her own silicone mold.
Here’s the best view of her polymer textures and of course you’ll want to stop by her Etsy shop and visit her on Facebook.
These beads are from Mari O’Dell’s Deep Textures workshop that she holds in her treehouse in Annapolis, Maryland. She has a distinctive way with textures. Mari’s a whiz with extrusions and she has a real love of Asian designs.
While you can find some small pictures and lots of descriptions on her website, the place to find her most recent work is on Facebook. Look in on her classes, check out her latest extrusion patterns and see samples of her cake decorating there. Be sure to check out how Mari adds buttons to flipflop sandals to improve their fashion statement.
While Anke Humpert is excited to bring her work to America (like these new distressed hollow Wheely beads) and visit the U.S. for the first time, we Americans are excited to meet our European counterparts.
Anke is speaking at the IPCA Synergy conference in Atlanta, talking about the European scene and the German polymer clay group, Polyclaykunst.de. She’s trained as an architect and has published a number of books and classes. Read more on Flickr and Facebook and check back here for the next few days to see what I see at Synergy.
These shapely complex beads from Dixie103 (Julie) provide a pleasant start to the week. Her husband thought they looked like magic lamps and dubbed them Alladin beads.
The shapes and patterns and muted colors make your eyes dance around to take in all the delightful curves and canes.
Julie is still shy about her work though it’s now her fulltime day job. See what she’s up to (she even posted her first tutorial) on Flickr.
