Into the New Year
I wish you all a happy, healthy, creative New Year in 2007!
I’ve added a tutorial for a shaded leaf cane and a simple flower center cane, pictures and improved graphics to my six petal flower cane tutorial as well as the Skinner blend plug. I hope to add many more useful pages as the New Year rolls in!
Clay Math Part III - Kaleidoscope Canes
I’ve been fighting with kaleidoscope canes again. As an apology to my clay muse, here’s a cheat sheet for laying out k’scope canes. It’s basic but it shows an aspect of clay that I love:
Clay squishes.
This is something my math brain forgets when I am sitting and designing. Triangle canes can be difficult to work with - you can use a square edge, like a box, to keep the right angle triangles crisp as you go but sheesh, what about those weird ones for hexagons? No worries, clay squishes.
So we can use a right-angle triangle to make our kaleidoscope cane and then carefully round the edges of the square. Or we can tip our right-angle triangle into the 60° triangle and use that to make a hexagon and carefully round THAT more simply into a circle cane.
Or, we can take our square cane, perhaps the result of the square cane above, tip it a little and use that shape to create our hexagon-circle shape.
I guess I simply needed a little reminding.
Come Play in the Claypen
One of the best ways to get your clay mojo going is to just DO. Like the gym it’s always easier when you have company. The Claypen Chat from PCC is a weekly meeting. There is an optional project that alternates between a ‘artist delight’ or open topic and a set topic every week!
Over the last year and a bit this group has created one of the largest single repositories of clay goodies. From newbie to experienced, they’ve hit dozens of subjects! Some of my favourites are the super beads or the bowls in this album.
So, if your New Year’s resolutions includes improving your clay work give this group a shot - they meet Thursdays at 11:30am EST in a Delphi PCC chatroom.
5 Uses for Scrap Clay
One way or the other every clayer ends up with scrap clay. Some of us make a lot of it. In fact some of us (like me!) make pounds of it a year.
I keep some rectangular containers on my desk to catch scrap as I work - they have ‘Cane & Translucent Scrap’, ‘Blues’, ‘Reds’, ‘Yellows’ and a final one for ‘Sludge’. I long ago realized I should have invested in Gladware or Tupperware. I do mix and reuse colours from my colour buckets. These go right back into the cycle for base beads, blends and so on. They’re not scrap yet.
For the rest:
- Make swirlies from the cane and translucent scrap. An excellent tutorial for this is from Barb Fajardo on PolymerClayCentral.com
- Make small textures. Take a ball of clay, pinch one end and then go take an imprint from something… a grate, a shoe, a button, lace, a stamp Cook like normal and use to add detail texture.
- Make bead guides - roll a sheet at each setting on your pasta machine, use one small cutter to cut a piece out of each sheet. Roll the piece into a ball. Pierce and bake the balls. Make a note on each what thickness and cutter made it. String and keep as a reference.
- Make face cabs. Form a rough oval and use a tiny pinch for the nose. Indent for the eyes. Slice and shape for lips. Use a needle tool and a little alcohol to shape and smooth the tiny features. Bake and either paint, cover or mold your little face.
- Make tool handles - either from the fun scraps or the sludge and cover with cane slices, texture, powders or any other decoration. One idea is to cover the eye of a yarn needle to make your own needle tool. Another is to add clay along one edge of razors to form safe handles for your sharps.
Tile Beads
Phew! Finally indulging my bead craving. Fresh out of the oven, a tray of polymer clay tile beads. These are destined for a few tile bracelets in the next few days.
Quilts in Clay
One of the artists I would DEARLY love to grow up to be in the clay world is Sarajane Helm. More than just fabulous work she does different work and seems to delight in experimenting with her clay. Despite being the author of several books she’s been very approachable online.
Judith Skinner(of the essential Skinner Blend technique) and her have just launched their book Adapting Quilt Patterns to Polymer Clay. Sarajane has a promotional powerpoint slideshow on her site with a nice musical score by her husband. The sideshow itself doesn’t work well for me - seems to be restricted to more recent versions of IE - but I was able to beg for another version that did work. Cynthia Tinapple also has some photos in a post to her blog.
-
Groups
