If there’s snow outside your window, you may enjoy this reminder of spring from Portugal’s Alexandra Guerreiro. Alexandra is drawn to flowers and even her birdhouse and wind chimes are decorated with her caned polymer versions.
Need some more warm colors? You’ll find them on her Picassa album and on Facebook.
Spring is just around the corner.
Lucille, Hortense and Annie greet you with flirty smiles. Chifonie’s Les Trois Filles are 4″ long-necked brooches made using a combination of canes and delicate drawing. Their softly rouged cheeks, tilted heads and floral clothing give them a winsome appeal that’s very different from most faces in polymer.
See more of Chifonie’s distinctive style on her Etsy site and Flickr pages.
These two recent cane offerings may appeal to your cane brain – the part that enjoys figuring out how a pattern is assembled. Would you have guessed how Meg Newberg constructed a houndstooth cane before you saw her visual tutorial?
Wanda Shum covered a “Who’s da bomb?” form with tumbling block cane slices. She shows the hexagon canes she started with and her color palette on her blog. It takes some staring at the basic triangle and diamond shapes to get the gist of it.
This cane exploration and catching up online kept me entertained during long waits in airports yesterday. It’s good to be back home.
Katie Way brings us a whole bunch of very cool textured polymer hearts for our Friday enjoyment. Katie’s Bull’s Eye Studio shares studio spaces and gallery/classroom area at Upstairs Studio in downtown Anchorage, Alaska.
If you want a hit of happy color or a reason to dust off your extruder, check out the header on her Facebook page. (Here’s the image for the non-FB crowd.)
One more sweet little non-caloric treat to make it a lovely weekend – a freebie heart tutorial from Meg Newberg.
Nat Gernigon posted this very fun Cane Scribbles tutorial on her website as a New Year’s gift to polymer artists. Her photos make it easy to follow along even though the text is in French.
The concept is one of those clever, simple ideas that was hiding in plain sight.
As you cruise through her archives and photo pages you’ll see that Nat is accustomed to being different and she likes designs that are off-center. Thank you, Nat, for helping us start 2013 with a new trick.
Louise Smith’s Swanwalk cane marries Bettina Welker’s extruded retro cane with Alice Stroppel’s scrap idea. The resulting combination cane looks organic and like snakeskin.
Louise takes a chunk of scrap ho-hum cane, reduces it to a diameter that fits the extruder, and tops it off with two chunks of contrasting plain colored polymer. The resulting long extruded snakes are combined Bettina-retro-style. It’s all documented on Louise’s Flickr site. Getting your head around the concept is a good exercise to start the week.
And while you’re getting acquainted with Louise, be sure to look at her Facebook page which is filled with even more eye candy. Thanks to Perrie May for the new link.
Kathrin Neumaier taunts us with more of her tantalizing Pardo translucent creations. This time she shows thin color-blended petals gathered and suspended from earwires. Makes you think of projects to try for spring, doesn’t it?
This hummingbird seems to be attracted to the flowers! It’s a big cane (2 1/2″ tall and 6″ wide) from Jennifer Patterson. She’ll fill in the voids with translucent to reduce the cane.
Here’s her Quilted in Clay fan page with pictures of her booth and other great canes.
This survey asks a few brief questions about monetizing your work. Whether you hope to cover your costs or support a lavish lifestyle, we’d like to hear from you. This is the third of four surveys Judy Belcher and I made for our Synergy3 presentation in the spring. We’re loving all your responses!
Anke Humpert is surveying European polymer artists to bring the Synergy crowd an accurate picture of how polymer is faring there. Read about her data-gathering and take the survey here.
As you start to make polymer mementos and gifts for the holiday season take a look at what you may think of as the lowly keychain.
Zona Manualidades (the photo) and Silvia Bordin (the keys) demonstrate a couple of memorable and fun options.
Baking polymer designs right on the keys makes construction easy and the hardware is minimal. The ball shown here contains tokens or coins.
I’m guessing that the bezel on the photo is polymer which has been filled with clear resin. The cording could have been strung through or baked in.
Think of it, there are few things you handle more often than keys! Make them memorable.
Just when we thought we’d seen every Stroppel variation possible, we stumble on Sue Corrie’s latest riff on the technique. My eyes danced around her colors and landed on those gradated round slices with cherries on top. Even slight variations in color make a difference.
And this was just my favorite. You’ll like others in her gallery and on her Flickr site.
Be sure to read how Sue selected her business name, GhostShift.
I forgot to push the “publish” button so we missed coffee with you this morning.
There’s a buzz around the neat colorful tumbling blocks canes by Germany’s ST-Art-Clay. This updated interpretation of the historic quilt pattern uses shades of the colors to give the design dimension created by extruded triangles and edging strips.
ST’s colors are vivid and fun and she shows lots of variations on her Flickr page. You can see that she’s taken great master classes and that caning is her forte. She is able to control her canes in ways that many of us envy. Did you see her wildlife canes? ST is about to go wild!
The link first came to PCD via Cate van Alphen. Thanks!
