-
Art Bead Collaboration Fun
My most recent foray in Art Bead making was a very delightful time collaborating with one of my favorite artists, Susan Carlson, of Swanzey, NH. I drove out with my can’t-live-without tools and supplies, set up in the back room that looks over the evergreens in her back yard and all of that snow that NH has been blessed with this year, and spent many hours exploring different styles of beads with her. We laughed as we worked our way through pan after pan of beads, trying a bit of this and a bit of that. Sometimes it is good to just work on one form (beads) for a while…
-
March ABS challenge: Emily Carr’s Haida Totems
It seems that each month brings a slightly different sort of challenge, or at least I keep finding new things to learn about my work as I do them! I loved the colors in her watercolor and I have always been fond of the Pacific Northwest, so I expected this month to be at least easier than last month. I did some searching for other images by Carr and found that she used more vibrant colors in other pieces and a bit about her history. I was in NH for several weeks visiting my mother and I took advantage of her art library to see what she had on Inuit…
-
February ArtBeadScene Challenge: News of Spring!
The February challenge piece is an illustration from 1913 by Edward Julius Detmold, “Amapolus”. The colors are not really my normal palette and the delicate precision of the illustration felt a bit intimidating at first, I have to admit. My work is organic, but not in the precise, lovely way that Detmold’s work is! I did enjoy working with the different coral and red striped canes that I tried for the leaves, but I couldn’t master the tiny tendrils of the seeds the way I wanted to and still be confident that they would stand up to any kind of wear. I ended up with a pin and a…
-
Vessel Rehab’s
Both vessels have survived their days in rehabilitation, I am happy to report. They ended up providing fodder for more surface finish and sculptural experimentation as well as providing the lessons on patience I mentioned in the earlier post. 😉 I added several layers of inks and mica powders on the back of this piece, re-fired it with a line of liquid polymer to close the seam up, and then added the red poppy pieces along the seam. The poppy sections are extras from the ABS challenge this month, with lots of striping, translucent colors, and irregular textures and I liked the warmth that they bring to the back of…
-
Experimentation with Vessel Forms
The Polymer Clay Guild I belong to does periodic “challenges”, particularly when we are coming up on a group exhibit but also just for fun. The challenge for February is to make a “bowl”, however you define that, and I have been wanting to try some polymer vessels in addition to the fiber ones I have been doing up until now. This coincided very nicely with my survey of vessel forms that I have been collecting on Pinterest for a while and my need to do some experiments from that survey as examples for my Voice class. I love it when a plan comes together…. 😉 I started small, using…
