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Tracy asked how
this was made because she didn't get to come to demo yesterday so I wrote this
for her and thought it's worth saving.
Ok, it's really Easy Breezy. Wonderfully useful technique that can be
done in different colors and then added to other things and just
gosh.
Take two colors and blend them.
Biz-Archive/Blend-Grp
Then take that blended sheet and fold it so it is long and narrow
with a solid color on one end and the other solid color at the other,
the blended bit is in the middle of the folded log.
Press that by putting in the narrow end, one of the solid colors, and
press a long long ribbon.
Then take the color clay that will be your dots.
In cane making a dot is a SNAKE, a line is a SHEET, graded colors
like are a BLEND. Three things only go into making canes.
So we have this long blended ribbon, that's going to be our
background hues. We are folding snakes/dots, into that ribbon. Add a
snake, roll the ribbon, you've made a dot with a background of some
sort. Keep on adding snakes, rolling the ribbon. How many snakes to
add, well how many dots do you want? How long the ribbon, oh it'll
vary on how much clay you use? How much clay should you use, how much
do you have?
I give you general instructions and no set measure. Use what you have
on hand. In the amounts that don't terrify you. LOL
Ok, so we stop putting in snakes into the jelly roll of blended
ribbon when we want the dots to stop on our final flower petal cane.
I use the light end of the ribbon first, using the other color of the
blend as the snake/dots. When the snakes are being folded into color
that is the same I stop adding them and just roll the rest of the
ribbon around and around until it ends.
If I don't have a solid color all the way around the final jelly roll
then I'll add a bit more, but that's just fiddling about to make the
outer surface of the cane be the same color.
What else. Oh reducing. Polymer Clay is like silly putty, it
stretches. I grip the cane in the FIST OF DOOM and choak it like I
mean it. Flip it around in your hand and grip, grip, grip. It'll
start to stretch out. Put it on the work surface and roll it with the
palms of your hands. It will get narrower, and longer. At this point
you can pick it up and start to pull it from the ends, it's elastic,
the design will still be there if you pull it down to the smallest
size.
So when do you stop pulling and stretching? How much clay did you
use? What scale flower do you want to make. I suggest folks to keep
the ends fat and just reduce the center. Take slices from big, medium
and small parts of that cane and you can make better flowers. For the
inner petals are small and they get bigger as you go further out on
the rose, let's say. Having petals all the same size doesn't work as
well as having different sized petals.
After you've reduced the cane to a general size you'd like your petal
to be, now you can pinch along the sides of the petal cane to form
the petal before you slice the cane. Want a petal fat on the top and
narrow on the bottom, like for roses, then pinch the petal cane like
that. If the petal is more like a spear, pinch on two sides and mash
down the center of the cane so you get an elongated oval. Then slice
your petals.
Petal slices have blunt edges, the sides of canes are flat, so we
need to pinch around the edge of all the petals to flatten that blunt
edge out. Then we can take that flower petal and shape it.
We can take a leaf shape petal slice and fan out the top and narrow
the bottom. We can take an elongated oval and stretch it so it's long
and narrow. We can take round petal slices and do a "paper tearing"
movement (Named by Aunt Jude) and you get a ruffled edge to the
petal. Put a mess of those together and get marigolds. For example.
So that's the Stargazer Lily text tutorial but dig it...
Change the blend from burnt umber to gold to pearl
Change the dots from one snake to three or four snakes of one black
and the others raw sienna.
Do the same snake folded in blend strick and get Leopard Spot on a
background that goes from one color to the next.
We take a basic technique of snakes folded in blends and when we
change the colors we can get many variations on that theme.
Ya, that's the ticket.
xoxo
NJ
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