Dayle Doroshow Workshop: Messengers & Storytellers

Messengers & Storytellers

Day two of Dayle Doroshow's polymer workshop was Messengers & Storytellers. We spent the day making figures, learning the techniques for making them and embellishing them with canes and mokume gane that we brought from home. This is normally a two day class, so we had to cram a lot of ideas into one day.

One of my ideas, sparked by a freeform method of collage that Dayle had us do, was a polymer figure I called "What To Wear?" My figure is a funny looking woman who isn't as good looking as she thinks she is, and her attire (various canes applied to her body) was all over the place color and design-wise. Maybe some in the class thought I had no feel for combining colors....but it was intentional on my part as I wanted this figure to be odd looking.

The above photo shows her in the middle with her soul mates, the fish (left) and bird (right). The door in the center of her opens and reveals the message "What To Wear?" The fish will have a message, too, but I'm not sure what it is going to say yet.

Here is the group of us at the end of the day before we departed full of ideas! I'm in the back in the middle. I'm so happy to have new polymer friends! These are the first polymer people I have met and it is so much fun to talk polymer with artists who understand and more importantly I learned something from every one of them.

Thanks, Dayle, for your warm and friendly approach to sharing your polymer ideas!

Dayle Doroshow Workshop: Chaos Cards

Dayle rolls out some clay to demonstrate a technique

Over the weekend, I traveled from my home in Aspen to Colorado Springs for a two day workshop with Dayle Doroshow, sponsored by Pikes Peak Polymer Clay Guild. After having not traveled much this winter, it was a nice road trip and the weather was great.

The first day was a workshop called Chaos Cards. Dayle had us make polymer cards that serve as inspirational jumpstarts for polymer or mixed media projects. We had the opportunity to try new techniques or revisit old ones while making these cards.

Chaos Cards I made on Saturday

I had a lot of fun with everyone in the class. Whenever I take a workshop, I always learn from seeing what the other students are doing and this weekend was no exception. 

Above is some of the cards I made. Time was short so we weren't able to do our best work, but Chaos Cards is a great idea and I will be creating more once I get home. Tomorrow I'll review the second day of Dayle's workshop.

Fun With Tory: More Imitative Ivory

imitative ivory beads-fish 1 1/2", horse and rabbit 1"

I carved and sculpted a fish, horse, and rabbit bead, then made a two sided push mold for each design. The figures appear on both sides of the beads. I used the imitative ivory technique that I learned from Tory Hughe's book. I have been making these types of beads in ceramic for many years, but for the polymer version, I was inspired by Dayle Doroshow's Imitative Ivory Face Beads shown in Tory's book.

Speaking of Dayle Doroshow, I am taking a two day workshop with her in Colorado Springs on April 19th and 20th! I couldn't be more excited and will report back here on how the workshop went. Colorado Springs is about 225 miles from where I live, and it will be a nice weekend road trip and I look forward to meeting the clay artists of Pikes Peak Polymer Clay Guild.

Fun With Barbara McGuire: Color Wheel

color wheel before baking

.....and a tip of the hat to Maggie Maggio who created and shared this color mixing technique.

I'd seen Maggie's videos about mixing colors on her blog, but it wasn't until I got the "Images On Clay II" by Barbara McGuire that spurred me into action to create a color wheel of beads. Maggie demonstrates using clay colors that are close to being true primaries: Premo Zinc Yellow, Cobalt Blue, and Fuchsia.

Barbara used Metallic Copper, Metallic Gold, and Pearl Blue, and the results are more earthy tones. I love that! I did a similar thing, but added some red to the copper and added some yellow to the gold to make them slightly closer (and brighter) to standard primaries while retaining the earthiness.

"Images On Clay II" is about image transfer on polymer clay, but this color mixing segment is included in the book and I highly recommend that any polymer artist who hasn't done this exercise to make a bead color wheel immediately! The link to the book is in my amazon.com list on the right. I love the secondary colors created by mixing the primaries, and plan to do more experimenting very soon.

color wheel in progress