Clay Guild Swaps

For the last meeting of the year, the swap theme is "Oceans". I decided to work on a very small scale, about 2" x 2" x 1/2", or thereabouts, and included some of my smaller fossils. The fossil replicas are done in polymer clay and alcohol inks, while the background is encaustic wax, oil paint, and alcohol inks. While they are a little too thick to make pendants or pins out of them, I decided to add magnet strips to the back for refrigerator magnets.

Textured Fossil Pieces

I took a fabulous encaustic workshop in textures at the Encaustic Center, where I learned how to create textures with wax. I think this incorporates the fossil pieces into the wax much better, and I am happy with the results.

I also played around with the clay mixture, and am finding the current mix I am using is much easier to work with.

Both of these pieces use encaustic wax, polymer clay, alcohol inks, freshwater pearls and oil paint. The long piece is 5 x 15 x 2, and the square piece is 8 x 8 x 2.

New Fossil Pieces

I got to spend Saturday with friends, and we spent the day working on art projects. I finished these 2 pieces, and have plans for both of them. "Amber Seas" is an organic fossil piece with trilobites and shells in green tones, and is for a friend's birthday. "Mercurical" is a blue and silver fossil piece, and is one I will probably keep. I am having fun working with this technique, and have plans to do some bigger work on larger wood cradles.

Another Fossil Piece

I have now finished my second fossil piece from a workshop. I like this one better, but still need to work on shaping more. It is done with polymer clay, distress embossing powders and encaustic wax.

I did have some trouble with air bubbles, leading to a few cracks, but I think I will keep this piece anyway and hang it up where no one will see the cracks.

Organic Fossil Piece

I took an amazing workshop last weekend from Jana Roberts Benzon, focusing on making organic shapes from polymer clay. The workshop has really inspired me to move forward with some more fossil pieces in Encaustic wax and clay. This is really just a prototype, but I will definitely be working on more.

More Avatar Images

I can't stop playing with this technique! I used an original photo of my niece taken about 4 years ago. Not really a good picture of her (she is much prettier in person than in photos), but I decided to use it to create more "Avatar" images.

Below is the original image I used.

New Digital Work

I love playing with Photoshop! I bought a magazine this weekend that had a tutorial on how to make a portrait photo look like the Avatar movie creatures. Since I did not have a face on portrait, I used faces from a drawing I did in a drawing class once. I used colors slightly different from the ones in the tutorial, but I am fairly pleased with the results.

Since it is snowing in Texas in March (which almost never happens), I then decided to add some backgrounds, and further change the colors up. I don't know what I will do with these images, but I had fun working on them.