I was fortunate enough to take a workshop with Jeffrey Lloyd Dever last autumn. It was a great deal of fun, and he taught us all the wonderful things you can do with paperclips, spit, SuperGlue, and polymer clay! This is a piece I started in that class, and I was determined that I would finish it. Here it is, in progress, fresh out of the oven. I have about 1, 2, ... at least two more layers to put on, maybe more, and then there are two elements to be made to go on the top and bottom....
I'm a little bit in love with this technique I developed - at least I've never seen it before. I was very unhappy with the uneven shape that existed after I wirewrapped the original structure. I was trying to get fancy, and make something different than a point. Silly me. Instead of getting something organic and elegant, I got something kind of amateurish and lumpy. And, I ran out of the black wire we were using.
So, I decided to EMBRACE the lumps! I closed off the top with a layer of SuperSculpey, and then made a bunch of little balls and glued/baked those onto the layer, and then put another layer, the purple layer on top, and got this delightful bumps and lumps (inTENtional lumps!) which looked exactly as I had imagined they would, like seeds in a pod, waiting to burst. These will be covered with yet another layer, and I'll have a design in the final, nice, smooth layer, so that this lovely purple I mixed will peek through.
I have been working in polymer clay, mainly because of this class, and also because I just can't afford to work in silver at the moment - as of this writing it's $29.01 an ounce, up from $16 an ounce a year or so ago. I can't work in bulk at that price. It's not just the silver, but the casting, the molds, all that has to be paid for on top of cost of the silver. So I'm enjoying polymer clay - the color, and the ease of being able to do everything myself. I miss silver though, and metal. I'm going to be working on things that I can set in copper with silver bezels. I see this polymer clay work as a precursor to working in enamel, someday.
Here's a view of the structure that Jeffrey taught us how to make in that workshop (seriously - SuperGlue and paperclips!) I highly highly recommend him as a teacher - he's a wonderful fellow, his wife is delightful too, and he's very generous with advice and suggestions. Look him up on facebook! He is scheduled to teach in France, but anywhere you can find him, it is money and time wellspent, very enjoyable.
I also am glad that I am starting work with polymer clay with a project that is rather large! I am not proficient in the clay, but this one project is teaching me a lot about the possibilities of the clay, and how to work with it. So far I've learned about baking, color mixing, how to glue bits together, and yesterday I took my pasta machine apart, cleaned it, and put it back together.
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