Artistic Process

Almost all my work is from a plan. That plan may be an order from my site for several dozen beads. Or it may be an experiment inspired by a custom order. Or any of a dozen other little inputs that get expressed in clay.

Since most of my work is millefiori, applied to beads or vessels, I can start with that.

Fleshing Out the Plan

If I am planning a new set of cane designs - which leads to a series of beads, bowls and other items - I start with a theme. A theme helps a story flow and I find it’s just the same with a body of work. For canes, I often relate them by topic, colour and subject. So Spring Flowers, Winter Holidays, Romance and so on. Some groupings get a little more fanciful names.

I find a good start for a set of canes is 10-12 designs where 6 or 8 of those are floral, one or two are leaves and the rest are emphasis pieces such as ghost canes, insects or animals. This is a working guideline to help give me a starting place - not a hard and fast rule.

From there, I start picking colours and designs. For a theme based on Spring items, I might pick pastels and work with a few floral designs that appear in spring - crocuses, narcissus, tulips and daffodils come to mind. I may work in a few butterflies or a bird for an accent cane and a coordinating leaf cane or two.

Because I want the set to work together for myself and my customers, my colour choices are made with this in mind from the beginning. I pick colours for my blends based on this and go from there. Outline and line thickness decisions in the designs are, likewise, matching. I sometimes pick out colours for backgrounds, here, as well. I’ve made quite a few charts for my colours so that I can come back and replicate as need be.

Production

For a cane run, I usually aim for the 10+ designs and to make enough both to use and to sell, at least in limited quantity. This means that an individual flower cane will run 3-5 ounces. More complex canes tend to be larger. So the spring run outlined above would probably start with about 20 or so little packets of clay getting prepped and blended into my colours.

I find it easier to work in stages - colour mixing then colour blending. Then to begin construction, add the background colours and finally to reduce and cut into segments. Along the way I cut reference slices and make notes.

Samples

Every new batch of cane designs gets used on a few sample pieces. In my case, that’ll be several sets of beads. You can never have enough beads.