Spain’s Manon van Kempen has a way with flowers and she’s not ready to give up summer’s brilliant colors.
The pink of this 3D flower brings the delicately silkscreened base to life.
See all the flower gardens Manon brings to life on Instagram, Facebook, Flickr and Etsy.
Michigan’s Sandra Niese (DandyBeads) eases us into Monday with a simple pendant. On its own, the spiral would have been too simple.
By embedding those metal pins into the edge of the design, Sandra makes us stop and take in the texture and the metallic finish and ponder the piece.
The dance between complexity and simplicity is a tricky one. See more of Sandra’s organic and slightly grungy works on Facebook, Pinterest and Etsy.
Pan pastels, improved crackle techniques and better glazes are making it harder and harder to tell polymer from ceramics.
This square pendant from Michigan’s Christi Uliczny proves my point. The only clue that this pendant is polymer might be its vibrant colors.
Christi credits Iris Mishly and Hilla Bushari’s imitative ceramic tutorials with teaching her the basics. See how Christi brings her own color sensibility to the pieces on her Etsy, Flickr and Facebook pages.
Love the depth and warmth of ceramic glazes? You can mimic them in polymer. No kiln required.
Italy’s Serena Pannunzio (Eala Jewels) created this Golden Leaf on the Water pendant, as a commission based on her polymer series inspired by fantasy, celtic culture and mythology.
Drops and swirls of polymer gather next to each other to form what looks like a darkly clustered design.
Paints and metallic finishes give the pendant luster and echoes of an ancient story. She shares more of her own history on Deviant Art and Pinterest. You can see how she is drawn to mystical themes that she loves to revisit and rearrange.
This pendant from Florence Minne-Khou (creationmyway) resembles the patriotic bunting that’s festooned around my neighborhood. It’s not likely that a U.S. holiday was her inspiration since Florence is French but still…
She swoops extruded flat ribbons of polymer from one side of a wire to the other, using holographic beads to hold everything in place and to add accent.
Shape-shifter designs have been jumping out at me (this one’s a year old) so we’ll declare that our theme. If you wander through her Pinterest page, you’ll see what speaks to Florence as she plays with shape. Admire more on Facebook.
If you breathe deeply you may catch a whiff of fresh, line-dried laundry as you study these silk-screened pendants from Spain’s Noelia Contreras Martin. Or at least that’s how they impress me – clean and crisp and summery.
Enjoy the rest of Noelia’s bounty on Instagram, Facebook and Flickr.
As we head into a sunny weekend, let me tidy my desk and share a couple of late-breaking news items with you.
Christi Friesen is test-driving the concept of using her Pinterest board to promote and sell (it’s all the rage). Take a look at her Sakura Pinterest page, a one-week art event that includes projects and tips and giveaways as well as art for sale. The online pop-up party continues into next week.
Speaking of parties, there’s one in the mountains of central Spain (Sierra de Gredos) this August 5-8 with teachers Robert Dancik, Natalia Garcia de Leaniz, and Olga Castuera. Sign up and get ready to add these new skills to your toolbox.
Here in the US, Marie Segal is creating a buzz with her experiments with Cernit’s translucent clay. Look at how the layers from these sample canes read through each other and retain their vibrancy.
Marie has put together a 12-bar translucent starter kit of Cernit if you’re in a mood to try something new. The kit contains 8 bars of translucent plus one each of Cernit’s four translucent colors –amber, emerald, ruby red and sapphire.
Usually Marie starts by mixing 2 parts translucent to 1 part color and adjusts from there to create the desired effect. Here’s her recipe for the colors used in this piece. You can examine more of Marie’s efforts on Facebook.
You may also be interested in the Cernit color mixes that Spain’s Ana Belchi has been sampling in her studio. You’ll find them on Instagram. If you need to know more, Ginger Davis Allman (BlueBottleTree) discusses the properties of Cernit in this review.
Jon Stuart Anderson breaks out of the pack again with his amusing sardines pendant. Look closely and you’ll see the silvery dimensional canes that make his fish alluring.
Jon’s studio is littered with experiments and jokes like this, including some new ideas for guitar designs. He’s hard to keep up with but you can try on his Facebook pages and website.
Just when you think you know where Milan’s Alessia Bodini is headed with her extrusions, she swoops in a different direction. On this blue necklace, she flattens an extrusion into a ribbon, loops it over and over, adds her own marks and threads it onto a choker.
She extrudes graduated purple polymer and joins lengths of the resulting triangles into a square pendant that teases the eye. It’s as if Alessia simply has to put her own quirky stamp on each design.
Thanks to Scotland’s Melanie Muir PCD readers hitched a ride to Palm Beach, Florida last weekend. Melanie was teaching and exhibiting at the Norton Museum’s Bijoux Show. Melanie’s show collection is cataloged here.
She caught up with Kathleen Dustin at Palm Beach Fine Craft Show. Melanie shares more than 20 snapshots of Kathleen’s new work including the pendant at left, part of her carved Tribal Queens series.
It seems that Melanie missed Deb Groover’s large polymer wall art at the show but you can see Deb’s work on her site and here on Facebook.
Thanks for the vicarious thrills, Melanie.
