So, let me share a few of the fun things I've been working on. As per usual, I've been bouncing around a ton between mediums that would appear on the surface to be completely unrelated.
Yarn painting:
Complicated-looking beadwork:
Some watercolor painting that doesn't need to be shown here...
And lot and lots of crafting-vicariously-through-others. Google image search, and now Pinterest, have been both a blessing an a curse to me, in that they offer me limitless inspiration while also threatening (and often succeeding) to make me losing track of time, thinking up millions upon millions of ideas and projects in my head, only to never have them take form in the physical.
Most recently, polymer clay and wire wrapping seem to be what I have finally settled on at this point of time. I've had a bout of polymer clay obsession once before in high school, and working with it reminds me of how much fun it is to make different color swirls and patterns appear and change. Trying new techniques and then bunching up what you don't like only to have it be transformed, like magic, into something new: maybe something really cool. Swirl lentil beads (something I had tried to master in high school but couldn't seem to get the hang of) are now one of my favorite ways to use up little bits of scrap clay, and perfectly demonstrate what I mean. (You can see some in the picture below.)
I was attempting to make a filigree ornament (like this) using a clay extruder I bought, only to realize that out of the 7 ropes I got from the die I was using, only the one in the center was actually usable for that project. It seemed too wasteful for me to continue with as I intended.What to do with all of the extra ropes that didn't make the cut? I took two of them and twisted them together. The result reminded me of very expensive handspun multi-stranded yarns I used to yearn for. I loved it. Then I coiled my new rope around itself in a spiral. I flattened it out, and admired the new sheet I had created. From trash to treasure, for sure! Then I was faced with a new challenge. What to do with it? I wanted to use it in a way that really showcased the colors. It had to be something that would make them pop, and not be hidden. At the same time, my little experimental sheet was only about 2 inches in diameter. There wasn't that much to work with.
I took my inspiration from a necklace I had seen here, and used my wavy cutter to cut thin strips. This doubled the size of the sheet I had to work with. I still had to decide what to make with it. I had finally gotten my hands on a heart shaped cookie cutter, so I made some hearts, intending for them to be eventually become pendants. I really liked what I had done, and it was something that I thought would be fairly easy to replicate. I made another set of ropes and eagerly coiled them up the way I had before, only to be slightly disappointed. It wasn't that it was ugly, but it did not have the many subtle variations in color that my first experiment did. This version was much more bold and took on almost a checker pattern.
I was inspired by something that I had seen in one of my Google image search inspiration-junkie sessions. I remembered it as being a cartoony-whimsical vibed clock, made with wedges of vibrant colors and patterns all swirling in toward the middle. I couldn't find the image I was seeing in my head, but I did find something similar (which I can't seem to find this time around either. Go figure.) Not having a strong reference picture scared me a little bit (I suppose I'm afraid I'm always about to do something "wrong," which is absolutely silly when dealing with art. Gotta let it flow!) but I sucked it up and ended up with something reminiscent of the could-be-a-clock picture in my head I swear I saw at one point. Here's a taste of some of the pretty things I've been cooking up:
Wire wrapping, though, is something that I have not played with all too much. The seed was planted in my time in Montana, perhaps, when I was doing my best to make decent looking jewelry out of origami. I need a lot more practice, and almost definitely a better set of pliers, but the swirling and looping and the fact that you can be as freeform or as precise as you want is very attractive to me (this is also probably why I like polymer clay so much as well). The fact that I made an awesome necklace in about half an hour of just messing around after giving up on some of the other techniques I was trying to figure out doesn't hurt in the positive re-enforcement/encouragement/instant gratification department. The (false) appearance of a never ending spool of wire also definitely helps with the creative process. No need to worry about "messing up," when there's lots more where that came from.
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