Polymer Clay Daily

Forced blooms

Odile Marchais and Nikolina Otrzan team up for early spring flowers on PolymerClayDaily.com

France’s Odile Marchais uses techniques she learned from Croatia’s Nikolina Otrzan to make these stylized springy brooches. Nik teaches a surprisingly simple way to fill unusual shapes with air, keeping them light yet strong.

The childlike design of spring Odile’s flowers reminds us of the spring flowers we’re forcing to bloom at this time of year.

Nikolina Otrzan gathers her inchies into a brooch on PolymerClayDaily.com

In Nikolina’s most recent post, she shows how to make use of those “inchies” that lots of us have collected from various classes and events. She picks out a few favorites and gathers them into a great looking pin.

A polymer builder

Otrzan on PolymerClayDaily.com

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.