"The essence of a polymer clay artist - we'll cover a wooden box with polymer clay and then work hard to make the polymer clay look like wood." ~ Me
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OMG what's up with everybody and their mother making fidget spinners out of polymer clay? I swear, it's an epidemic! Last week at the dr. office, I was in the waiting room for 20 minutes, and the air was full of the darn things because there were kids and early teens in the waiting room and every one of them was playing with one! Well, at least they weren't on the phones anymore.
Anyway. This morning I'm uploading an Art Nouveau earrings tutorial. Yes, I know, we did Art Deco a few days ago. Both are among my most favorite of the art movements.
Later in the afternoon when I come home I'll upload the Navajo bracelet.
It's in the final stage of baking. Should take about 20 minutes to completely finish taping then about 15 minutes to edit. Then I'll upload. I will try to keep this under 20 minutes so it won't take 8 hours to upload. Teaser soon.
I will upload the Navajo bracelet probably either tonight or tomorrow morning. I don't think I will have time tomorrow to make a tutorial as I have to go out and do stuff. So it's nice to have something already done, even if it's something that got delayed for so long. The irritating part is that me delaying the upload is just because of youtube's crappy upload speed.
Anyway. Today's tutorial is about a DIY faux jade on "silver" with the happiness Kanji. It does not involve any textures, just clay, the little "sausage" for baking long bails, acrylic paints, silver Inka Gold, some alcohol ink paints but those aren't really necessary, I used them because I only had two shades of green, fragments of them, that weren't really the best to make faux jade with.
So necessary:
- translucent clay
- silver or gold clay. I used silver because, well, I only have silver Inka Gold, and this thing looks better with a metallic wax than with an acrylic paint.
- some green clay of various shades
- optional green alcohol ink
- the "sausage" for baking long bails
- a big round cutter (the buggest in the set)
- a small square cutter (the smallest in the set)
- a thin pointy thing to make straight-line indentations
- leather cord or string, some silvery beads and a silverish toggle clasp
It's almost done. I'm waiting for the glaze to dry up so I can finish putting it together.
Teaser:
I know. I'm not happy about the "jade" too much either. Oh well. I really need to come up with my own thing on this one, I just followed someone else's. You know the saying "there's no better job than the one you do yourself"
Update 5:15-ish
Well it's still uploading. 2 hours left. Sayz the Power that Be aka Youtube.
In other breaking and wonderful news, my Michaels package finally arrived. If I weren't in the process of making two cuff bracelets with the "copper heat patina" thing, I'd be all over the extruder and making "Lalique" bwahaha. I should finish the cuffs tonight. Tomorrow will be the Navajo bracelet time - in the morning - until how long it takes to upload. I got stuff planned (theoretically) til 2 or 3 pm. Then it depends how tired i am in the afternoon, I'll be playing with the new stuff. Or not. I got the bake and blend too, so it will be time to make some textures and stamps.
Talking of which, I already talked to some friends in Europe. Next week I got to work on some good quality vector art to see if they can find someone to make texture sheets for me. I am honestly quite unhappy with most of the texture sheets on the market here. It's pretty much like "oh we know we suck at design, but we'll still sell you this crap we made, and we know you'll buy it because 1. Our name is X (big font X) and you'd buy any shit we make and 2. There's nothing else for you to buy out there, and even if there is, they don't have the advertising power we do - or the knowledge to make themselves known well enough".
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
In the mean time we wait for Youtube. To, Upload.
And here's Conor laying around all over the house trying to entice me with his fluffeh belleh. He got me a couple of times, I had to stop and pet that fluffeh belleh.
8:30 pm update
Wow. Here's a new one. It's uploaded, but now PROCESSING takes hours. It never took more than a few minutes before. it's 69% processed 1 hour 50 minutes remaining. Say wha...?
Yay. 3 hours. This is how long it's left on the first part of the patina jewelry set. But at least it will be uploaded today for sure. I will try to get the part 2 uploaded before evening as well. Because otherwise it won't get uploaded til Monday.
Tomorrow is Sunday and I have started the "clay with me Sunday" and I will be sticking to it. I am actually thinking of making a live thing starting next week. Announce what is needed 3-4 days in advance, then make an easy jewelry piece so people can actually really "clay with me" live. And who doesn't get to be online during the live event, the whole video gets automatically recorded and posted by Youtube.
What do you think? Would you like that?
9:50 am update
50% uploaded.
Time remaining: 2 hours 50 minutes. That makes this Saturday a record. The video is 25 minutes long. So it comes to an average of about 1 hour for each 4 minutes of video. Youtube. I'm at a loss of words.
4:20 pm, 39% of the part 2 is uplodaed. Youtube doesn't want to tell me at all how much time is left.
That is, grass seeds. Part of the delicate plants that have given their little contribution to this beautiful jewelry set.
It's actually necklace, cuff bracelet and earrings. Imitating copper with two kinds of patinas: the top is with faux heat patina, the bottom with the antique copper patina I showed you in the "patina with acrylics" tutorial.
I am almost done with the pieces. They're baking, and well, that will be 1 hour, unfortunately, because we're talking thickness when it comes to the cuff. After which will be the applying the patina part.
This will be again a video divided in two, as otherwise it would be way too long. But this time I will upload part today and part 2 tomorrow. Just because I need to go shopping again this afternoon. I need food. My furbabies need food too. And I don't like to leave the computers on, uploading something when I'm not there. So I don't think that there will be time for both parts to load by the time I go to bed. But considering how early I wake up, I promise I'll start the upload of part 2 before the crack of dawn tomorrow.
I'll post the teaser, as usual, in a couple of hours.
Teaser:
Update
oops I did it again
So I laid down "for a minute". And narcolepsied for a few hours.
That means you'll have Sunday's :"clay with me " repurposed into a DIY pendant and the patina set will be on tomorrow.
Sorry. I guess I wasn't as rested as I thought I was.
As I said in the video, there is a rule in oxidization - I learned this long time ago, in the Fine Arts school in the "antique restoring" class. When it comes to copper and copper alloys:
1. Copper by itself oxidizes blue. Various shades, can go from a turquoise blue to even an almost white blue. The older it is, it might either veer to green, or to grey, then towards black
2. In combination with other metals, like bronze (copper+zinc) or brass (copper with tin) the oxidization will veer more either towards green or towards grey. It all depends on the amount of copper in the alloy, essentially, the more copper, the more blue, the less copper, the more greenish or greyish.
3. The more aged a metal object is, no matter of the composition, the patina in time will get greener, and veer towards a darker green - going even towards black - for objects that are hundreds of years old. That is why it's called "verdigris", essentially Latin root words meaning "green-gray"
Examples:
How new-ish copper patina would look
older copper
even older copper
Sumerian copper coins - the patina is greyish with faint hues of blue or green but veers towards dark grey and black
newer bronze with greenish/bluish patina (more copper in the alloy)
newer bronze with greyish patina (more zinc in the alloy)
we see this all the time - brass with green oxidization
ancient Roman brass coin - patina veering to grey
compare to ancient Sumerian bronze coin
and ancient Roman bronze coins
Now, here's what you can get, a short reference chart
For the most commonly found acrylic paints, Americana
No idea what's up with me posting late on my blog in these past few days.
Anyway, as usual, late in posting but not late in work. I did most of the tutorial for today, just got the back and finishing touches to do after it bakes.
I decided - with Game of thrones season 7 starting soon and all the hype, that I, like a self-respecting die-hard fan of GoT, have to make my small contribution to the hupe, right?
So today I will upload a tutorial on how to make a dragon's eye pendant. No, not my old style ones, a new design. The old style ones already got stolen and people made tutorials about how to make them... lol
Anyway. It's going to take a while for it to bake as it's relatively thick and I want it to be sturdynot fall apart. I can assure you that it's pretty.
This afternoon I will just keep working on my other pieces. Maybe I'll post a pic or two.
No I didn't do yet the "whole piece" tutorial. The glaze is not finished.
I did make a new tutorial though. It's uploading, probably at least 2 and a half hours considering it's Saturday and the video is just a smidgeon under 15 minutes. I'll post the teaser photo in a little bit, as soon as it gets cold enough to get out of the oven and get some varnish on
I have to clean some, then do some grocery shopping - and probably will buy a few bricks of PC too.
We are supposed again to have very nasty (a.k.a. tornadic) weather today, waiting for the 9:30 update on that from the best weather man around here.
Will update later, as usual.
Here's the teaser photo. Yes, it's a fancy lightswitch cover:
Ok, tutorial is up
Update 3:20-ish
So most of the stuff is out of the way. I DID get a couple of bricks of souffle black and white, in the hopes of starting to work on the "wonky checkerboard" tutorial. I do need to clean around a little bit, but the main issue is that my hands are killing me. No, it's not the cervical spine issue, it's the bast of thumb osteoarthritis issue. I can barely grasp anything. It started actually yesterday afternoon and it just got worse and worse. The fact that we are expecting those tornadic storms this afternoon (any minute now, actually) is probably the cause. I'll take it easy.
If this whole journey to hell that is cancer treatment taught me, was that you must take it easy, and what you can't do today, just don't do it, you'll try another day. Because if you try and push yourself it will take you anywhere from 3 days to one week to recover and then you REALLY won't be doing a darn thing, lol
Today is a quite yucky day but, braving the rain, I still managed to snatch a couple of leaves to finally make this tutorial. It actually has two more parts to it - one is on how to make molds of leaves and the other one on how to make patterns with leaves on an object - I'm thinking maybe a light switch cover?
I started the upload of the tutorial. Considering the video is about 15 minutes long, youtube says 2 hours 15 minutes.
I'll update with the link to the video when it's done.
Update: it's up
This is the final product of the "bonus" part. As usual, I'll update more as the day goes by.
12:30 pm update.
About half an hour left on the upload.
And a surprise. I have 98 subscribers on my youtube channel! Considering that I posted the first tutorial 19 days ago, I am really surprise - and feel very blessed - that I already got so many subscribers.
I think this needs celebrating. And I think I will have my first giveaway. Once the tutorial gets uploaded, I will make a short - 2-3 minutes video for the 100 subscribers celebration and giveaway and just have to click "publish" when the 100th subscriber happens. I'm excited.
And I think I have the perfect thing in mind. To choose from one of my "happiness kanji" necklaces or one of the "bargello" necklaces.
