I’m happy with this experiment and excited to see what other combinations I can do.
Here’s a video walkthrough of the project
I started with a sheet of polymer clay that blended together scraps of different clay types in order to use up some very sticky and oily clay I didn’t like. I mixed in some Sculpey original in white, and Sculpey Premo in silver.
Next I used a metal rectangle cutter, then impressed with plastic leaf, roll gently with roller, and lift gently. Then baked in oven.
One of them got burned in the oven but it looks really interesting, like a city skyline looking from the ground up, the leaf looks like a tree so I painted it and I’ll be painting the impressions from now on because it adds a lot of visual texture and depth. It’s hard to capture in photo but there’s about a metric crap-ton of shimmer on these pieces.
I can’t quite explain it but the The burned city one reminds me of the book “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”. It’s an achingly accurate telling of humanity and it came to mind as I was painting this piece.
Border made of Sculpey Premo in silver through the clay extruder with the small line plate. That’s the best clay for extruding imo because it is soft enough to condition easily and extrude with little to no cracking, but it’s dry enough to not attach to itself without pressure, so I can extrude a whole bunch at a time and move it around easily.
I inserted a jumper screw before baking, I’ll add a touch of CA odorless glue at the end
When cool I used UV/led resin hard type and put it in the lamp for about 15 minutes total. I need to document the time better, I kept checking on it 🧐
I have some butterflies I’m working on today with the same technique so I’m excited to see how those come out.
I’m falling in love with these butterflies. I was inspired by the kinds of pictures my grandma liked to color mixed with the shapes and designs I like. I know she would love the way these look.
Things I’ve learned:
– gloves help keep the clay neat which cuts down in time it takes to make each piece, but I need a smaller size
– trim the pieces first, the border doesn’t cover imperfect edges
– resin needs a bezel. I couldn’t get it to the edges without going over the sides and dripping. I should have used a taller border to create a bezel .
– I get the same hard shiny finish with gloss varnish, the only difference is varnish sinks into cavities whereas resin rests into it then pools atop itself and makes a hard glass finish
