Music to my ears

Leonini makes polymer music on PolymerClayDaily.com

Italy’s Cecilia Leonini (ImpastArte) hands us a pun with these long curls of musical score. It’s a clever and chic use of transfers (I’m guessing transfers).

“My background is music and I taught piano for many years,” says Cecilia. “For me the clay is the synthesis of all the arts that I love.” And we love the play on words that these earrings allow us. Where does your love show in your work?

Cecilia usually works in bright hot colors that fit perfectly on the FoltBolt site with lots more on Facebook, Instagram, Etsy, and Flickr.

Mixing polymer digitally

The UK’s Jon Burgess brings his computer drawings to polymer in the ways that don’t have the usual hard-edge digital transfer look.

He’s working on ways to camouflage the seams on round and tube beads and hints that he’s working on a tutorial.

If you’re not in love with your phone’s camera and editing software and printing, you may not share Jon’s enthusiasm (and mine). To us the mash-up of polymer and computers looks like a big unexplored territory with lots of possibility.

See Jon’s very personal way of mixing media on Etsy, Facebook and his blog.

Dog bowls

Of course you’d guess that Baltimore’s Linda Pearl was a dog lover from her bowls in the swap at the Virginia conference. You might also sense that her background is in pottery. And her shapes and treatments have a distinctly Japanese feel to them.

She showed me how she cut a shape and let it slump inside a hemisphere cake bowl creating a graceful shallow dish shape.

She transferred her images from toner copies and played with various textures and metallic finishes.

Linda’s Facebook page is pretty sparse and she swears that better online presence is on her to-do list. Click on the images here to see more.

This crop of bowls was a particularly good one and we’ll cover it more completely in Saturday’s StudioMojo.

Collaged transfers

These glowing hollow beads from Claire Maunsell are patterned with collaged pieces of laser transfers. The elegant mix of patterns shine through dark and distressed surfaces. The combination lends her beads an aura of a rich and mysterious past.

Claire’s added a number of collaged and hollow beads on her Flickr pages. Go there for your first-of-the-week jolt of inspiration.

We happened to be working on laser transfers in our weekend class in Minnesota. See how Maureen Carlson turned the transfer of her sprite into a sculpture and see some of our class pictures on Instagram.

Feathered polymer

At Creative Journeys Studios Kay Bonitz’ works jumped out at me. The pieces were stunning and the name was unfamiliar. Turns out that Kay is from Asheville, North Carolina and she’s known for her beading work. She hasn’t gotten around to adding her polymer pieces to her web site which is why we missed her.

Kay often adds beads and feathers to her polymer art. She haunts the outdoor stores and fishing supply places for embellishments like the fancy rooster feathers that bounce and wave when you move this textured brooch.

The back of each brooch is an unexpected treat and Kay often etches fortune cookie sayings and pithy remarks there. You can see some examples on the page I made of her polymer work.