These polymer beads from Russia’s Victoria Mkhitarian calm me down on a busy day. And they look mighty pretty with the PCD site colors, don’t they?
Sometimes when you’re tired and fresh out of brain cells, it’s good to go with your gut. Find something pretty and just say, “Ahhh.” Take a break and browse through Victoria’s interesting shapes and clever combinations.
Lori Wilkes’ was one of six polymer booths at the local show and I spotted this new necklace. The beads looked African to me but she swears that she was following an Italian influence. Either way, kewl. She revealed that tool used to distress these beads is a fine wire dog brush.
Lori has a book coming out in October that may satisfy readers who complain about how artists getting started in polymer can be deluged with confusing and conflicting information. Lori’s book, The Absolute Beginners Guide: Working With Polymer Clay, is from Kalmbach Books and it’s available for pre-order on Amazon. Sample a few pages here.
Spotting polymer at artfairs is one of my favorite games. The others I found yesterday were Kim Arden, Valerie Wright, Annabelle Fisher, Greg and BJ Jordan, and River Wolfe. Hope I didn’t miss any.
Another spirited necklace! Today’s Paradise Circus is from Nova Scotia’s Jenna Wright. Extrusions are coiled around some spheres then carved. Extruded slices are applied to others.
Jenna’s Etsy shop name is Boxes for Groxes and what we know about her we learn only from her colorful, playful aesthetic.
A little more research revealed that her shop name comes from Dr. Seuss’ Seuss-isms for Success whose whimsy fits nicely with Jenna’s art. Read the whole tongue twister here.
This splash of color from Toronto’s Dorothy Siemens jolts us into a new week. Flat disks of polymer in turquoise, gold and cobalt are interspersed with spheres and a focal lentil covered with mokume gane. A graphic artist, Dorothy leans toward primitive, tribal and bohemian designs with lots of asymmetry.
The color continues on her Flickr site where you’ll see how Dorothy’s knitting skill meshes with her polymer creations. She makes buttons and scarf pins, of course!
Someone had to polymerize the Olympics, right? The gold medal goes to Croatia’s Nikolina Otrzan and her Citius, Altius, Fortius necklace. That’s the Olympic motto – Faster, Higher, Stronger.
Nikolina’s polymer rings are colored with chalks, sealed with a glossy coating, and joined with large jump rings.
She’s also been perfecting her writing on polymer, hiding messages in her graphic designs for pendants. Browse around her Flickr and her Etsy sites and enjoy an Olympic weekend.
We’ve been on an extruding craze lately and here’s one more for you to try while it’s hot and the clay is soft.
Fanmaus (Tatiana Begacheva) from Russia brings us this cheerful jumble of pyramids covered in extruded strings of clay.
I’ll guess that she baked the base forms first, then she adhered the strings to the triangles and fired again. The chunks move and the colors spiral to give the necklace movement and interest.
The UK’s Angela Garrod starts our week with these tidy bauhaus-like designs. The hollow lentil beads are covered with geometric designs that combine gold and pearl mica polymer with black contrasts.
She admits that the designs presented complex and challenging problems. Angela was named Voila’s Polymerista of the Year in the Proficient Category for 2011. She has started teaching her techniques and is scheduled at the UK’s Polymer Pamper Play weekend in April 2013.
It feels as if you could brush warm ancient sand off these polymer treasures from Elena Sevva (here’s the correct link). Elena is from Ukraine and lives in Israel.
She wraps delicate wire around some of the amber-like beads and strings them on a leather cord to complete the effect. Stamped designs and scratches are accented with faux metallic and ceramic finishes. Look at them more closely on her Flickr pages.
I’m fully in vacation mode and PCD posts may reflect that as they appear little later and on a more leisurely schedule. Let’s all have some summer fun.
On first glance, I thought these beads by Madrid’s Silvia Ortiz de la Torres were covered with fabric that had been gathered at the ends. Each bead is entirely polymer.
The pinched ends connect comfortably and Silvia and her daughter decided they look like teeth – molars perhaps.
Eri, an artist on Etsy, brings an architectural sense to her simply sculptured polymer necklaces. In the Pansies Between Pink Corals necklace she places groups of rounded polymer disks off center between small pink beads.
Her work is filled with references to flower petals (lillies, pansies, tulips, water lilies) as in this Meadow Around Your Neck. Her other inspiration comes from sea creatures (limpets, sea anemones).
What we know about Eri is that she’s a full-time architect in Athens, Greece and that she has a way with clay.
