The playdoh faux wood cane

This cane is a very easy variation of the playdoh cane, and makes a wood surface with a lot of texture. The texture is naturally aligned with the (faux) wood grain, and is great for all antiquing techniques.
This works great with molds:


As a surface texture for faux wood (adapted from the twig tutorial of Randee M. Ketzel)

The playdoh cane

Two years back, I experimented a lot during the fantastic "Becoming a better artist" course of Christine Dumont on Voila!. One of these had a huge potential, and many applications: the playdoh cane.
These jellyfish have pinhole sized-holes all around:



This is a variation of the Stroppel cane. The internal walls are about half a millimeter thick:

Starting again ?

After forever, a reboot of this blog...

I had been relatively active in between here.


I can't promise this will be regular, or anything, but I want to group older and new polymer work and tutorials under a more cohesive (and more easily findable) structure than my photo streams. Hope it will be of help...

Je n'ai pas trop le temps de tout faire en bilingue français-anglais, mais s'il y a assez de demandes, je m'y mettrais...

Noir et blanc

Hexacorallia in black and white

Un collier terminé in extremis pour le challenge noir et blanc sur Parole de Pate. Kato polyclay en blanc et noir gravée d'après des transferts de dessins anciens adaptés, trouvés sur le site de l'Educational Technology Clearinghouse de Floride, peinture acrylique noire. Je ferais un bref tuto quand j'aurais le temps (pas tout de suite, donc).

A necklace I finished minutes ago for the black and white challenge on Parole de Pate.

Kato polyclay in black and white, engravings using old drawings adapted from those found on the Florida's Technological Clearinghouse website, black paint. I will explain how I did it when I have time.

Il y eut pas mal de casse dans l'opération, et partie d'assez de lentilles pour faire plusieurs colliers, il n'en resta qu'un d'arrivé à bon port.

Un s'est perdu au dernier moment : les lentilles noires et blanches qui devaient être assemblées ne vont manifestement pas (ou plutôt plus) ensemble.

Lots of disks got lost in the process, the ones just above at the very last minute: antiquing transformed them just enough that they would not look good together.

Il reste beaucoup de lentilles, mais le problème est visible sur la photo: elles ont changé de couleur à la cuisson, aussi bien les noires (et translucide) que les blanches, et il n'y a plus de quoi assembler des colliers entiers et assortis. C'est la première fois que cela m'arrive avec la Kato, mais j'ai eu trois couleurs légèrement différentes en trois cuissons, en partant des mêmes paquets...

There are lots of engraved disks remaining, but not all can be used as the baking process (which I performed in several distinct occasions, a mistake obviously) changed the colors, both dark and light. This is the first time this happens to me with Kato polyclay, but this time it gave me three different colors for each shade from the same pack and even conditioning... A few might still be salvagable for Christmas presents.

Elder sign experiments

I like jewellery made of beads that look like stones or branches. I have started experimenting to build a bracelet or a necklace with polymer "wood" or "coral", and stone-lookalikes. Now I am somewhat satisfied with my quartz mix (although this last iteration is a bit too pink for my taste), I made some stones beads.
I did not like their shape too much (and they had an already baked core from sculpey light: no way to alter that), so I wanted to somehow add interest. I went for the classics, with the two Elder Sign versions and the yellow sign, Propnomicon version (I known, it is upside down on the picture). I must admit I like the two branching patterns best. The others need some ameliorations, so I set to make more.

The next generation of stones, unbaked, and one of the rough sculpey light cores. The shapes already look more interesting. These all have two parallel channels for thread, and are much flater than the previous ones.
I then added the lines and baked.

To go with these, I have started working on twigs with Randee M. Ketzel's great tutorial. The color of the stones is still off, but I will do better next time...

Plus de cailloux...

Still in the silicon molds, and antiqued with black acrylic paint: Premo frost, ochre oil paint, metal fillings, and mica substrate from one of those canned plants. The canned plant did not grow, but the mica flakes substrate has found a new use. Lower picture : liquid Fimo, metal fillings and mica. I should not have left it alone before putting it in the oven, all the flakes and fillings fell to the bottom, but the liquid fimo is remarquably clear.

Toujours dans les moules à chocolats. Cette fois, Premo Frost, peinture à l'huile ocre, paillettes métal et surtout paillettes de substrat mica provenant d'une de ces canettes à plantes (la plante n'a pas poussé, mais le substrat est en cours de recyclage...). La photo du bas : Fimo liquide, paillettes métal, et mica. Note pour plus tard : ne pas laisser reposer, tous les morceaux tombent au fond...

Next time, as a treat, better pictures thanks to this high tech setting (for which I need to thank Jen at Epbot):

Faux et usage de moules (VF abrégée à la fin...)

I had wanted to try faux stones from polymer clay for a while. I made a few tests two weeks ago, but they did not turn out quite as expected (mainly my fault, really), and were simple beads anyway, nothing very interesting. Last week, I tried again, this time with more attention to the details. I used three colors, a Fimo turquoise straight out of the pack, a turquoise-ish, greenish mix, and a red-orange mix that was first destined to become coral, but got structurally weak because I mixed too many things in the clay.

I made a rather simple mix using black acrylic paint, and rough clay pieces made with a grater, the standard « turquoise »mix found in almost all websites (see GlassAttic and the Polymer Clayspot for instance) and in books (Carol Blackburn's Making Polymer Clay Beads). The more interesting part (for me, and hopefully for you too as I have not seen it yet described elsewhere), is what I got using cheap silicon chocolate molds (1.99 euros) to make cabochons. The molds come in a variety of shapes on the same plate (see picture), and of course are oven-safe. I aggregated the clay and paint in the mold to make a relatively fine layer (0.3 to 0.5cm) without working it too much, and baked. In parallel, I baked fine (0.15cm) slices from canes inspired by the Donna Kato squiggly beads (from her Millefiori Techniques book) and Melanie West's striped canes in the same molds (last picture below).

The resulting cabochons are quite nice and get the turquoise effect accross as I wanted, but this is actually a less than optimal use of the molds, because the look necessitates sanding the paint off the surface. The molds are so smooth inside, that they result in the same shiny and smooth surface as clay in contact with glass or tiles during the baking. The acrylic paint is fused to the surface and both form a beautiful shiny surface (see close-up). Of course, this works only if the clay was pushed well into the mold : see the difference between the red and the green stones... The cane slices gave a less shiny, but still very satisfactory result, although I had to sand one because of black clay pieces that got stuck between the clay and the mold.

This could be used to make all shapes and sizes of cabochons, as the base can be cut or sanded away to make a smaller or a flater piece, or the mold not filled to the brim. Assembling two half spheres would also yield nice hollow beads, I have to try that.

Version française abrégée :

Les moules en silicone pour chocolat offrent de très bonnes possibilités pour réaliser des cabochons creux (ou pleins, si le coeur vous en dit). Jusque là, rien de bien révolutionnaire, mais j'aime bien redécouvrir l'eau chaude. Etant donné que les moules sont très lisses, les surfaces résultantes peuvent être comparables aux surfaces brillantes obtenues en contact avec du verre ou de la porcelaine, mais avec une grande variété de formes (et un démoulage très simplifié) : c'est utilisé par beaucoup de monde pour fabriquer des cabochons de résine, voire en fimo liquide. Mais les mélanges peinture acrylique/morceaux de polymère tels ceux employés pour les techniques de fausses pierres (turquoise, etc), donnent de très beaux résultats, extrêmement lisses et brillants (cf photos) si on a bien mis en contact le mélange et le moule (pas comme dans le cas des pierres rouges...) et qu'on fait cuire dans celui ci. La taille des cabochons peut être réduite après cuisson en découpant l'arrière et/ou en le ponçant jusqu'à arriver à la hauteur désirée, et en ne remplissant pas les moules jusqu'à ras-bord...