Gaudi Colours

I am busy working on the project I will teach at my "Inspired by Gaudi" beading retreat in September 2011.

When deciding on a theme for the retreat Gaudi seemed an obvious choice because of the geometry of his work and his use of mosaic and colour.

I have decided to bead a geometric pendant which can be opened.

My colour inspiration came from this photo and I decided to use a strong orange (which was shiny) a blue (also shiny), black (once again, shiny) and yellow (yep, you guess it, shiny).

Now, I know from experience that too much shiny is not good for a project so I added in a matte orange to try and counteract all the shine.


Here you can see my first attempt using these colours:



Not good!
As I thought, all the shiny beads meant that the pattern and different colours were lost in the mix.

So next I moved onto using much more of the matte orange beads:



This was much more successful
This time at least you could see the structure and pattern much better and I was happier.

However, I felt that the colours looked a bit "muddy" and none of them stood out and "zinged" as I felt the colours did in the photo.

So I decided to add in white (more of a creamy-white as I felt white would be too hard):


I love this!


I think the oranges, yellow and blue stand out much more- even though there's far less of them.
It's amazing how the simple addition of another colour can completely alter the look of a piece.

Donna Kato bracelet

So when I last wrote about my bracelet it was waiting to be lined and decorated.
Today I got to complete it- it now just needs sanding etc to get it nice and shiny.

I began by lining it using the same violet I had mixed for the zipper cane. Next I mixed what was left of the violet with yellow, of course:

This I used to make some skinner blend bullseye canes:

I surrounded the canes with what was left of my zipper cane:

A few baking later and my bracelet is done all bar the sanding:

Playing with polymer clay - day 3- part 2

The last afternoon here at PolyClay days and the class I have been waiting for- Donna Kato and her fabulous bracelets- so exciting.
I'll start by posting some of Donna's own bracelets so you can see what we're aiming for. Her use of colour is wonderful.



We begin by making the bases of our bracelets- in black- and then a zipper cane. We were given black and white clays but I already had an idea of the colour scheme for my finished bracelet- yellow and violet- so mixed up a clay using violet, white and grey to get a nice, subtle colour which I'll use again as the bracelet lining and for decorative canes.


After our bases were formed and baked we added our canes and cooked again- this is how mine is at the end of the day- hopefully I'll get some time soon to work on it a bit more.

Playing with polymer clay - day 2- part 2

The afternoon of my second day at EuroClay carnival was spent with Sylvie Peraud doing her project based in in-filling colour into baked polymer clay.

Once again the clay was provided and by the time I chose it was pretty much yellow left- fate huh?

But as I knew we were potentially combining it with black I once again couldn't bring myself to use the "warning colour sheme" so made a Skinner blend with some white and brown added- which of course completely altered the yellow.

After I had baked my pieces I began to carve into them to add patterns.


I decided to in-fill my two pieces using colour theory- so one one piece I added brown to create more of an analogous colour scheme.


On the second piece I added a violet for a complementary scheme- I used a "soft" violet so it wasn't so bold.

Playing with polymer clay - day 2- part 1

My second day at The EuroClay Carnival and two new classes today.

The first one I was looking forward but had no hope I would actually be able to do it as I don't think I can work intricately. Ok, I know I do intricate work with beads but I think that's different- the holes tell me where to go and there's no hope of me squashing it all as there is with clay!

Our teacher for the morning was Iris Mishly (and here) and our project was flower canes.

As you can see I got on ok with these in the end!

We began by choosing 6 colours- hmm- looks like only 5 in the photo!

For some reason the violet just wanted to appear exactly the same as the blue. So I messed around with a few setting on my camera and managed to get a photo which looked a bit nearer the reality.

A bit more fiddling on my computer and the colours I really chose were these. I have no idea why this happened and have put this top of my list to look into on my colour investigations!

Anyway, I didn't like the garishness of the orange so decided to alter it by adding blue and brown- the colour I started with is on the right and the resulting mix is on the left. I ended up adding roughly double the quantities of the blobs of blue and brown you see in the photo.

The two main things I have discovered about the advantages of working with clay over beads are:
1- Colour mixing- what a joy to be able to come up with your own colours and as long as you have the basic colours of clay, the colour world is your oyster!
2- Speed- I can't believe how quick it is to make thing using clay- such a change over my beadwork.

I next needed to come up with a Skinner Blend using a colour and white and decided to choose my violet clay. Note the speckles in my white clay- it was impossible to keep clean!

Skinner blends are wonderful things and enable you to come up with so many shades within minutes- imagine trying to track down all those shades of bead to get a blend like that- impossible!

If you want to work out a colour scheme that blends from one colour to another than this useful online tool will help

Lastly I made a striped stack to use for the centre of my flower canes.

This was rolled with white to make a cane and here's a close up of my sheet so you can see the tiny stripes.

The next part of the class was assembling all we had made into flower canes and this was great fun and I was better at it than I thought I'd be- but my no means any good at it compared to anyone else- one of my flowers just looks like slices of an orange!

The last part of the class was spent layering our canes onto a sheet of backing clay. I struggled with just my flowers at first as the pink/ violet ones didn't go well with the orange ones but by putting slices of the flower centre canes they all came together- just a shame i didn't like it- it was all too bright for me- and I can't get over thinking it now looks like slices of oranges and strawberries- still better luck next time.

I used my sheet to make pillow beads- another first - and bracelet sections- and am hoping that if I string them with dark purple beads inbetween they'll stop looking so "citrussy"

God- how much did I make?!?!? doing all of that in seed beads would have taken me weeks or months- this polymer clay stuff is growing on me by the second!

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