Giving in

Sometimes you just have to give in to the urge to work something through - even if the timing couldn't be worse!  In the last few days I've been struggling with the ongoing paint job at the house (enough said), listing on Etsy, making some custom orders and helping the kids finish their Halloween costumes (required for school tomorrow).  I swore I would not help them this year, but somehow last night I helped my son make a matador hat and today I have to finish the edges of a bird costume that my daughter has almost finished.  She is actually becoming quite handy with a sewing machine - an essential life skill in my little world...

When those serendipitous things happen in your work, it is such a gift that you should just accept it and work with it instead of struggling.  Sometime ago I bought a set of metallic paints to use with polymer, but every time I tried them the result was so disappointingly garish that I would throw all the results away and curse my inability to resist temptation in art supply stores.

These new beads came about as a result of using up scrap bits of transfers and putting them onto the surface of my hollow beads.  It occurred to me that this might be a good way to use metallic, because there is some movement in the action of applying the metallic tile to the bead which removes the static quality of painted metallic.  It's this quality that I think I've identified as being the one I dislike.

It started late one night (after cleanup) with this set of beads -

You can see the tile and the random texture I used to fill the intervening spaces - nature abhors a vacuum and so, apparently, do I!

Then a couple of days later I dragged out the metallic paints...do you ever have an idea you think is great and might work but you are almost afraid to try it because  you will be so disappointed when it doesn't work?  That mindset, that's how it was...this little fellow popped  up because stripes are on my mind.

I liked the fact that the metallic paint was visible, starting to break up, and married well with the texture.  So then these followed, all  taking little tiny steps towards other ideas.

I do like the painterly landscape quality of this particular set.  What's fun is learning to control the degree of spread of the tiles, and you do have a LOT of control - which I like.

This is the last one so far -

It has a quietness about it because the metallic is buried under translucent. Just one of the literally hundreds of possible variations for this technique.  I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a tutorial on this technique, or if it is just my current enthusiasm that is making me a little blind here?  Do let me know!

Sorry for the long post - if I could discover how to put photos side by side on Blogger I would be a happy woman!  I think I must be missing something very obvious...

Come and gone

March break ( which started for us on the 26th of February) has come and gone and it seems that winter is going with it.  We only really had one snow storm so the cross country ski season ended last weekend - almost a month early for Quebec!  In keeping with this whirlwind arrival of spring (once we get rid of the disgusting gravelly snowbanks) my mind and work is also dashing from here to there and possibly forging ahead and also hitting brick walls.  I have to keep reminding myself of the exhilaration of learning a new medium which carries with it the down side of temporary defeat.  Usually, when your ideas get ahead of your skills...

I titled this post to remind myself to enter more stuff in my sketchbook, because the ideas seem to just multiply and then as quickly disappear until something reminds me.  More orderly exploration is needed - for me, anyway.

Here are a few things I'm working on at the moment:  the exploration of transfers continues - it's a process that is fraught with moments that can wreck your whole piece, but for some reason, I like it.  I don't cover them with paint, either!  I like playing with the images before the transfer process, gives me a sense of (dubious) mastery over the computer.
Things I have painfully learned:  Dark transfers are exceedingly tricky and always work with very warm soft polymer...

In a moment of insanity, I joined the Ring-A-Day pool on Flickr.  There are so many interesting ideas there, I just had to be part of it.  Never mind that it is becoming the ring-a-month pool for me...  I'm going in this kind of massive stone-like direction with this.

And lastly, I'm working on new nested or nestled pendants which are beads which fit together - hoping to list a couple of these on Etsy this week.

I realize that this kind of work starts when I try to put my own beads together and I can see the findings and connections - I hate that!  Soon I'm going to have to buy some copper clay and make my own custom findings.  Yet another thing to master...

Credit where it's due...

 I realized that in my haste to post about printing on baked clay I neglected to give credit to the person who invented it - shame on me!  You can read all about it on Foah Designs website.  I was very hesitant to try it because printers and I have a long history of disasters together, but eventually I convinced myself by acknowledging that my printer was already 10 years old and I would love a new one anyway.  If you follow her directions exactly in the tutorial,  it works perfectly!  I love the qualities of the finished print.  It is perfect for flat applications ( but sadly not for beads, I'm still researching that..), but the print is fragile and needs to be protected with a layer of liquid polymer for durability.

I think Foah Designs is Pam Hall.  I'm guessing this from looking at  her Etsy shop - but I'm going to email her and thank her for sharing the results of her experimentation!

Here is a picture of one of her lovely wallets made using this technique: