Clay, Color, Creativity

I finally finished Lindly’s  pinched petal necklace with Kato clay .  I made a huge skinner blend with my dream machine and used it all so it is twice as long as the Premo one.  I still had a problem with the cracking when I pinched some of the petals but I took the time to heal them now that I know they will show.  It is hard to tell from the pictures but the Kato colors are more intense even though I used the same primary colors.

I want to try the watercolor beads next.  I made one when I took Maggie’s color workshop a few years ago.  Now that I know more about color I would like to make a whole necklace.  It will be hard for me to “mud” down the colors as I always tend to use bright ones.  But I think the muted ones look better with this technique.

On Friday Maggie is coming to Ohio to do a book-signing and many of our guild members are going.  Maybe I’ll get a picture to post here on my blog.

The petals are baked and strung.  After comparing them to my collage I think my primary color choices are good … perhaps a bit of tweaking is needed on the blues though.  I used the new formula Premo for this cane  and found it to be really sticky so I leached the skinner blend overnight.  When I pinched my petals several of them cracked on the back side and I wonder if this was because of the leaching.  I used them anyway because I didn’t realize that some of the  back sides would show. You really can’t see it so much in the picture but they really do look bad.  I think I am going to do this exercise again with Kato.

Petal Necklace with Premo

I am having the hardest time with this.  It’s not that I don’t understand it, it’s that I just can’t “see” it.  I made beads with my leftover clay when making the pivot tiles.  Using my value sorter I tried to sort the beads into value groups.  I was ok with finding the darkest value beads but felt that I was just guessing at the rest.  I decided to string the beads and tried to distribute the values so that no two adjacent beads had the same value.  But again, I felt that I was just guessing and going more by the color than by the value.

I’m having fun with the pivot tiles and learning more each time I make a new one.  As Maggie suggested in the weekend extra, I made one with a color that was not a pure package color.  I mixed a burgundy using Premo fuchsia and alizarin crimson.  I made a double set using white, gray & black on one then ecru, burnt umber and a mixture of both for the gray on the other.  I found that the changes in the varied  set were more subtle.   Looking at the picture, columns 1, 3 & 5 are the white, black & gray ones.  Columns 2, 4 & 6 are the ecru, burnt umber & mixture of these for a gray.

I worked on my “Tasting Tiles” today.  I’m amazed at how much I’m learning from doing this exercise.  I made some changes to the “mud” tiles.   I had a difficult time making the little pie charts dividing the colors into 3rds.  Then after I baked them I had a hard time telling the zinc yellow from the cadmium yellow.  So I made rectangular charts and  put a “z” on the zinc yellow ones.

Earthy Collage

As I was gathering material for my collage I found several earthy browns that I was drawn to.  I don’t usually like this hue and was surprised that they appealed to me.  None of the clippings looked good with my first collage so I made a collage just using them and I love it.

Clipping

There was one clipping that I really liked and when it didn’t fit into my first collage I was sure it would fit here but it didn’t.  I’m going to keep it though because I love the way the blues and browns work together.

I made a few more pivot tiles today too.  I am using Premo and after working with cadmium yellow I wondered how much of a  hue change there would be with zinc yellow so I made one to compare.  Yellow is not one of my favorite colors but I love the greens   I got and I think some of the muddy colors will help me find colors to match those in the “Earthy Collage.”

Zinc Yellow on the left and Cadmium Yellow on the right

I was hoping that upon completing this book I would be convinced  to move out of my color “comfort zone.”  I’m only about 1/4 through it and I’ well on my way.

“Polymer Clay Color Inspirations” by Lindly Haunani & Maggie Maggio

ThisI placed a pre-order for this book right after I took Lindly’s class in Michigan and it is finally here.  My plan is to go through all the exercises and projects and post the results here.    So far I have completed the first 2 exercises, and am working on the 3rd exercise. Tomorrow I hope to start the first project and get some pictures taken so I can post them.  

I think I finally figured out how to do this so here goes …