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ENDLESS EXPERIMENTS

Pendants from carved stamps.

If you remember my sketches from a couple of months back,  well, I finally have a few pendants finished.
I sponged underglaze on the stamp, and then added details freehand. In the first two I also used some dimensional black underglaze. With the Protea, I pressed harder while the clay was soft and got some nice texture. 

 (See original post If you missed it @ http://www.blog.beadsofclay.org/2012/02/inspiration-africa.html )

Sometimes I feel like I am forever experimenting, yet never making progress. I am so hard to please; never entirely satisfied with my results. In this case, I also worked some of the designs into Ba relief mini tiles. Which I will reduce in size further for pendants.

Even though I cut them out using a template, I had trouble keeping them squared up and all the same size. 
These are also painted with underglaze.

Which technique do you think is most effective? I'm open to suggestions.





6 comments:

  1. What kind of underglaze are you using? I am having some trouble with my paint being sticky even after rebaking.

    I really like the second set. I am partial to a raised design. I think it pops more.

    Also, what are you molds made of? they don't look like polymer.

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  2. Wow, great work! I love them all!

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  3. Roberta are you talking about polymer clay or earthen ware/kiln fired clay? These are kiln fired clay, as are the molds. I can't imagine any kind of earthenware underglaze getting sticky, but yes it happens with polymer clay if it's an incompatible paint. Some paints react to the polymers. Use water base acrylics on polymer clay. If you were talking about earth clay, try Amaco underglaze.

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  4. Those are wonderful, love the mini tiles, I can see where that shape would be hard to keep square.

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  5. Great post.....wonderful work. THanks for sharing.

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  6. I love seeing your process - drawing to carving to finished pieces.

    One thing I find personally difficult is working with molds - the kinds where you push the clay into it, then wait for the clay to set up a bit, then pull them out...

    I know this has everything to do with my level of patience (or lack thereof - lol). So I tend to just carve out a large piece of clay with images, bisque fire it, then roll out a fresh slab of clay and roll it over the textured bisque clay, pull it off for the reverse image and cut out the pendants.

    There are times though that I want to use this technique of making a mold for pieces though. Thanks for sharing with us!

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