I'll Be Back - In The Fall

Summer is here and lots of company coming and activities planned. Jazz Festival is near the top of my list, as is pushing paint around. Hope y'all have a fabulous, creative summer. See you in September.

The Sand Sweeper

As is so often the case these days, I'm obsessed. This time it's The Sand Sweeper. Perhaps it's this time in my life that has me dreaming and imagining - no, I guess I've been doing that since the day I could put together two coherent thoughts. The storyteller has been awakened. The one who thought she could only say it visually, through her paintings, is now streaming words. These vignettes seem to end in cliff-hanging anticipation and I realize, finally, that it is because they are related. They are all fragments of a larger picture, an epic Edda/Rune/Skald that has been percolating for quite a while. I look forward to each segment revealing itself, and then, to the angst of bringing them all together.

Here is the beginning of the next character - The Sand Sweeper:

The Sand Sweeper walks the beach in the grey of the early morning, as the spray from the roiling surf shrouds the driftwood in glittering capes of moisture. She studies the sand, looking for disturbances in the patterns traced by the sea nymphs. These she sweeps urgently back into the relentless waves, doing her part to ensure that the balance between sea and land is maintained, that Gjettling won't be disturbed.

"I saw her this morning, Mama!"
"Who did you see, child?"
"The Sand Sweeper! I saw her but she didn't know I was watching."
"How do you know she didn't see you, child?"
"Because she was making strange motions with her hands and singing and then she started sweeping very hard". Liv's voice dropped to a whisper, "and, besides, I was hiding" she breathed. Mama smiled, "Maybe your were dreaming. The sunsprites often play games with young children in the afternoon, when the gentle breeze helps lull then to sleep."
"No Mama, it was real! I know it was her! She looked just the way you told me when you read me the poems from the Northern Skalds. She was tall with long, silver hair. Wisps of foam clung to the strands and crystals were twined in between, crystals that made song!"
Her mother turned sharply towards Liv, "what do you mean: the crystals made song?"
Startled, Liv looked at her mother, "I don't know how to explain it, Mama. There was a beautiful sound in my head and I knew it came from the crystals and I knew the melody and I knew the words and I was singing the song - I just knew it...... somehow."
Anne-Brit's breath caught in her throat. "She saw you," she whispered. "She knew you were watching!"
Grabbing her daughter's arms and pulling her close, Anne-Brit demanded, "This is important, Liv. Tell me everything you remember."
Liv's beautiful, hazel eyes grew large with fear as she looked at her mother..........

Unfinished

Burlesque Blend Workshop Finale

Carole, Ellen, Evelynn, Gaby, Bunny, Lynda and Georgia

Such a great workshop to finish up with in Montreal! An enthusiastic, youthful and obedient class - what more could an instructor ask? They responded to my encouragement and gentle prodding (ok, they responded to the lashings and browbeatings) and turned out some beautiful pieces.

We worked hard and had a ball:

Nicole's fabulous studio added to the creative "ambiance"

Georgia concentrating

Burlesque Blend - More Color Variations

In preparation for the final workshop this coming weekend, here are a few more color variations. These are less dramatic, but very elegant. When exploring a particular technique, keeping certain design elements similar, really helps you to see the impact of the elements that you are experimenting with. In this case, the shape of the bead and the shape of the "path" are similar and this makes it easier to concentrate on color.

Pretty in Pink

More Burlesque Blend pieces as I prepare to teach these upcoming workshops (yes, I'm anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive!) The interesting thing about this particular colour combination is how beautiful it looks on all types of skin. Pasty-white or deeply-tanned, this just glows.

The design in this piece works well for me. The asymmetry of the pattern in the focal piece keeps the necklace from becoming boringly symmetrical; the large amount of pink in the two pieces flanking either side of the focal element draw the eye away from the middle and up towards the face; the next two flanking pieces, with the diagonal patterning moving diagonally down and out stop the eye from leaving and pulls it back to the central elements.

The finishing details often get neglected because one gets so focused on the clay technique. In this case, although the pink is very cool, suggesting silver would be a good accompaniment, the metallic sparkle in the 3 central pieces is more muted and casts a bit of a gold tint, which knocks back the colour intensity in the polymer and also allows me to choose spacer crystals that are metallic gold-tone with a hint of pink interference. These crystals are flanked on each side by an oblong, faceted black crystal and this combination really enhances the sparkling feel of this piece.

To finish off the necklace, round black agates are used instead of crystals, keeping the focus in the main polymer area and providing a very comfortable feel on the neck. Notice, though, that it is not just a bland, monotonous strand of beads. These agates are broken up periodically with a pink/gold interference tube seed bead, again adding interest, but not detracting from the main attraction.





I'm working out more colour combinations for variety for the students. It's not logistically feasible to structure a workshop so every student can choose every element, but colour is very personal, and where possible, I like to provide that choice while maintaining limits on size, shape, pattern, etc., as seen here:

Studio Tip #5: Slicing a Round Log

I'm up to my eyeballs preparing for the upcoming workshops that I'll be teaching over the next 4 weeks! In the meantime, here's a short video to show you how I slice round canes/logs, keeping them from flattening out on the bottoms or from squishing them. If your clay is very soft, let it sit for about 20 minutes before you slice (I must admit, I never have that amount of patience!) Polymer clay is "thixotropic". That means, like yogurt and acrylic paint, when you work it it becomes thinner, but when it then sits for a while, it firms up again (to varying degrees). Sorry about the music - I always have it on in the studio and consciously don't notice - it's that much a part of my creative process, lol.

Polymer Clay 101 - Chapter 1: Think Wax!

I have decided to post a series of basic information in addition to my regular posts.

This is the beginning of a monthly (hopefully!) series of posts that are intended to give you my experience with polymer clay and my observations of this unusual medium, from the bottom up. I would like to help new clayers to understand the medium, to become familiar with its quirks, so they can concentrate on creating, not getting bogged down because of "failures" due to technical problems. I'm a firm believer in there being no mistakes in creative endeavors, but it's heartbreaking and frustrating to have your efforts end up broken, burnt, or otherwise useless. This is meant solely to offer my lessons learned, observations made and conclusions drawn during my 24 years' progress as a polymer clay artist.

1: I don't think of polymer clay as "clay". It does not act like earthen clay at all. I have come to think of it in terms of "wax" as it behaves similarly to wax, and this reminder helps me when I'm working absentmindedly and not getting the results I would like. Wax softens with heat. So does polymer clay. I often pack the clay into my clothing before starting a day in the studio, and this warms up the clay safely. That does not mean warming up the clay results in "conditioned" clay - it just helps with the conditioning process. The clay still needs to be thoroughly mixed to redistribute component chemicals and yield a good, strong, final product.

Earthen clay takes an impression quite easily. Wax does not, neither does polymer clay, especially if it is not warm, soft and pliable, so there are several things you can do to help it warm up. Friction transfers kinetic energy to the clay, thus warming it a bit as you roll vigorously across the surface with your acrylic rod. Putting hard pressure does not do much to help. Think of putting pressure on a wax candle - see? Warming up your instruments (pasta machine, tile or glass work surface, etc. will help, mainly because these items tend to be cooler to the touch and suck the heat out of the clay as you work on it! So warming these up with a hairdryer (or a heating pad) before you start working, really helps.

Speed also impacts on the results. Unless your polymer clay is very warm, soft and pliable, you need to affect it slowly in order to achieve good results. For example, the images below show fairly softened clay run through the pasta machine rolling slowly (#1 - on the left) vs rolling quickly (#2 - on the right):

please click on image for larger picture

These pieces were conditioned, the same size, rolled on the same setting on the same pasta machine, using the same rubber stamp. The difference is due to the speed of rolling. Rolling slowly allows the clay to "yield" to the pressure and conform to the stamp shapes whereas rolling quickly causes a wave of clay to move ahead and the impressions are not as deep and are quite distorted.

Thinking of polymer clay as similar to wax helps to understand other things that happen. For example, translucent clay has a property known as plaquing - forming small, flat, roundish discs below the surface when baked. This is a wonderful quality when you want to mimic jade or some other stones, however, it can be a nuisance when you don't want it. The reasons for this occurrence are not fully understood, although some feel it may be moisture from your hands that contributes to it happening. In watching what happens when I run translucent clay through the pasta machine, it became evident that rolling too quickly tended to trap minute amounts of air in the clay, which looked like small, whitish striations barely visible below the surface. Rolling slowly, this did not happen. I feel that this is another situation where rolling quickly doesn't allow the clay to conform to surface differences, whereas rolling slowly does, and it gives the clay time to fill in depressions and air does not get trapped. This seems to be particularly important in translucent clay which, for some reason, seems more waxy than pigmented clay.

'nuff said! Please feel free to leave feedback.