Monday, July 16, 2012

somewhere on the way to being finished...


fresh from the kiln, just before being put in the tumbler to become all shiny...



Saturday, July 14, 2012

Thursday, July 12, 2012

work in progress...


spent today working on some new pmc pieces...


all these pieces were made using either my scratch-foam drawings (below) or the stamps I made.





Tuesday, July 10, 2012

imprints & 'out'prints...


After hearing about Scratch-foam from some of the ladies on the Metal Clay Heads team, and reading about it on Wanaree's blog here, I was very keen to get my hands on some. After a bit of (virtual) running around, a package arrived a few weeks ago.


I've been having lots of fun drawing on it & as well as using it to create raised textures directly on my metal clay (imprints), I had this idea to make some polymer clay stamps from some of the designs ('out'-prints).

First, I drew my designs on paper, then I put the paper on the foam & went over them with a ball point pen (pressing quite hard)  to transfer them to the foam. I then went over the lines with a small ball burnisher, making them as deep as I could.


After conditioning my polymer clay, I kind of smooshed it into the outline, them rolled it flat. (Ignore the coloured marks, I was experimenting with other polymer stuff - but that's a whole other blog post). I added handles to my polymer stamps (which you can't see in these photos, oops) & baked them.


At first I wasn't sure they'd be deep enough, but they seem to work quite well. I can't wait to finish & fire the pendant, so I can see the finished product :)

Did I mention drawing in the foam is heaps of fun? I could spend a day doing just that.