skygrazer.com

I enjoyed the following excerpt from an article about a miniature show. We all say, “I could do that” when we look at things, even if it’s silently in our heads. You never realize how involved something is until you actually try it.

Donna Henricks, who will teach a wicker furniture workshop, has made miniatures for more than 30 years.

“People can’t believe that you make it,” Henricks said.

During one show, a woman approached Henricks to ask about her flowers created from polymer clay. When Henricks told her the price, she decided it was too steep and instead bought supplies to make them herself.

“She was at the table the next morning and said, ‘I was up all night,’ ” Henricks said. “She couldn’t begin to make anything that looked like a flower. Until someone experiences trying to do it they really don’t realize. They think they’re kid toys, so why are they so expensive? They’re really adult collector pieces.”

I came across this article on an exhibition of two artists who use polymer clay

Check out the exhibit website where you can see a couple images of the work - looks rather interesting if a little off the wall

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Big meets small in “Not to Scale,” an exhibit featuring the work of Luber and Peebles currently on display at the Saratoga County Arts Council gallery, 320 Broadway in Saratoga Springs. The show runs through March 1.
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Peering through microbinocular lenses, sculptor Peter Luber creates complicated works of art within the confining glass walls of vacuum tubes.

Matthew Peebles sculpts 3-dimensional comic figures, including a life-size image of a man with a painfully inflated head.

Studio by Sculpey has its own website if you want to check it out. It looks like most of the information is Coming Soon though.

I came across a nice article featuring kaleidoscopes in New Zealand.

Kerikeri couple Andrew and Robyn Leary have been in the business for 27 years and sold more than 200,000 kaleidoscopes.
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Mrs Leary, an industrial chemist and leadlight artist at the time, asked her husband, a joiner, to make her a kaleidoscope. The end result led to commissions from friends followed by the establishment of their own business, Scopes New Zealand.

I came across this article about Damon Bard and the sculpting work he does for the movies. Polymer clay is one of the materials he uses.

Bard designs characters and also sculpts others’ character designs into models called maquettes. “I design in 3-D primarily. I do design for creatures and characters like what DreamWorks does, or I’ll design a monster or something for visual effects shows. If there is far too much [work], I’ll work with different sculptors. Mostly, of late, I have been doing character sculpture — everybody seems to like what I do with that.”
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Materials: “I use different kinds of clay for different maquettes. If we are doing a fast sketch, I may make it out of a polymer clay, which can be baked and painted. It is semi-permanent — it turns rigid. When we get a design we like and we want to evolve it . . . I’ll do it out of a clay that has to be molded because it’s not permanent.”

The Noank Foundry (where I’m currently taking a sculpting class from Chris Long) now has a website. Check it out if you’re in the Connecticut area.

The Connecticut Bead Society is holding their annual Bead Bazaar on September 15th and 16th. It will be from 10AM-5PM at the Holiday Inn, 201 WASHINGTON AVE. (RT 5) in North Haven, CT.

If you’re in the area, drop by. I’ll be there Saturday and some of my beads will be at the Southern Connecticut Polymer Clay Guild’s table. You’ll also get to see beautiful work from the other artists in our guild. It’s a nice show and for the first time they’ll also be doing classes, including one by the guild’s own Diane Villano. Go to the Bead Society’s page if you’re interested in registering.

It’s funny, but I tend to be inspired by deadlines. I haven’t been making much lately but I’ve created a number of new designs for the bazaar. The latest class I took was on sculpting relief and I used some of what I learned to sculpt a horse and fox. They are smaller with more detail than I’ve done before. I think I want to make a couple others too and fortunately I have a few weeks before the final deadline for beads.

It’s easy to come up with ideas. It’s fun, if challenging, to sculpt small animals but it’s always hard to deal with the practicalities afterward.

How exactly is this barn swallow going to become a bead or pendant anyway? How should it be hung? Should it have a backing? I want it to still look delicate so I don’t want to make it too thick - but it has to be thick enough so that the wings and tail don’t break. This year I used wire in most of my pieces instead of putting a hole all the way through. A simple loop of gold-filled or sterling wire allows the piece to be hung as a pendant without being thick and unwieldy.

What sort of finish should I use? Faux ivory, bronze, irridescent mica powders? There are so many choices it can sometimes be paralyzing instead of freeing. But when I have a deadline, and a purpose, I don’t procrastinate as much. I make a bronze and an ivory version. I cover that finish that I really didn’t care for with embossing powder to make it look ancient. I touch up some beads from last year because I realize that they really don’t have enough contrast to see the detail from a few feet away.

Somehow the pressure makes me relax and allows me to play again. Which is a good thing. Because I think I want to make some wild and wacky lizards and maybe a snake or two. And if I get time I might make some more dragon’s eyes. And I want to sculpt a gazelle or maybe a cheetah… Or make a little raccoon looking out from a hole in a hollow tree….

Quick little article about artist Judy Summer who didn’t let her declining sight make her give up art.

She can’t solder or do detailed jewelry work anymore. Yet still she works, crafting horses like grass-green “Springtime” and dawn-red “Sunrise” out of polymer clay. They stood proudly Saturday at her booth at the Park City Kimball Arts Festival.

“I can’t imagine life without making art,” said Summer, a petite, spirited 71-year-old.

I checked out her website and she makes these really great free flowing horses.

I came across this article, Weird Science Makes Wonderful Art about a teleidoscope as public art.

It’s a telescope. No, it’s a kaleidoscope. No, it’s both — a teleidoscope.

Local artist Gregg Payne created the teleidoscope from scrap metal, including a four-foot piece of copper pipe, stainless steel couplings and an iron base that used to be a giant belt wheel.

Out of scrap, a beautiful piece of art arose, and out of the scope, beautiful pieces of art arise.

The teleidoscope will become a piece of public art to beautify Park Avenue in Chico and it will produce photography used as art in a number of places, including the Jesus Center and the Butte Art and Design Digital Outdoor Gallery, along Second Street.

Payne explained that he started with a design for the piece about a year ago, and with funding from Rory Rottschalk, of Culp and Tanner Engineering, he ordered the lens — a sphere of leaded crystal from Austria — and had three 4-foot stainless steel mirrors cut.

Looking through the scope provides a fragmented, reflected and symmetrically replicated view.

But unlike common, hand-held kaleidoscopes that viewers hold up to one eye, the six-inch viewing end of the teleidoscope allows the viewer to use both eyes, rendering a three-dimensional image.

The scope can be swiveled and rotated to follow moving objects or to focus on any particular object, creating beauty out of ordinary objects.
“I always wanted to do more interactive and optical projects,” Payne said.

Article on miniature doll artist Cheri DeGruccio.

Cheri DeGruccio makes dolls. But not just any dolls. She makes tiny dolls. Make that teeny dolls. Actually they are teeny-tiny dolls.

To give you a sense of size, know that you could hold a whole bunch of them in your hand. Some of them are 1½ inches. That would be a big doll. Others are far smaller.

And she makes them all by hand using clay and paint and seemingly endless patience. Then she throws them in the oven. She also makes their clothes, which she admits is not her favorite part.

“I was at a bookstore and for some reason a book caught my eye,” DeGruccio said from the Cave Creek home she shares with her husband. That book was Family and Friends in Polymer Clay by Maureen Carlson and it detailed the process of making clay figures.

DeGruccio got into the sub-specialty of what’s known as doll-house miniatures. As the name suggests, these are dolls small enough to fit into a dollhouse.

As a child, DeGruccio had a dollhouse that her grandfather built for her. When she was 18, she started making doll-house miniature furniture.