Experiments in swellegant part 2

Finally  found a couple spare hours where i attempted to recreate my happy accident. This time I deliberately did not add the patina until the Swellegant metallic coating was dry.  This time I used copper metallic coating  instead of brass.  After baking, I added the Pearl EX varnish and once again the patina blossom occurred. Instead of a green tint one would expect with verdigris,  I got more of a blue tinge to the patina. It is still a pretty color.

Before varnish

After adding varnish

The sparkly bits are from some copper foil I added.

Happy accident

We are still busy with our move to Ocean Shores. It is a slow process, moving one car load at a time on our days off. Now that tax season is here, it seems we hardly have any time off together.

  This last weekend I had three days because of Presidents Day, but Dan had to beg to get Saturday off. We loaded up a lot of stuff for my studio and headed down after work. Saturday was a very busy day not only with unloading the car, then finding that my storage drawers I had such hopes of fitting in the closet were half an inch too long. Now I have piles of shoe boxes that I had unloaded from these storage  units taking up way too much space my studio until I can figure out another option.  Lord Opuson is like "just put the units in the garage", but I don't want to be traipsing out there every time I need another Mica powder or bead.

    Then at noon I headed over to the Gallery of Ocean Shores for a memorial gathering  remembering Ken Whitmore, an extremely talented photographer who was killed in an automobile accident several months ago. It was a very good turn out. He had touched a lot of people who showed up to pay their respects. Got to meet several members of his family and more artists that show at the gallery. Then at 5 o'clock, was the quarterly Gallery meeting.

Such a busy day I hardly had any time to play with my clay, but I did get in a few hours between the memorial and meeting. Being so rushed actually led to a happy accident with the clay. Before I went over to the memorial I had started to create some veneers using Debbie Crothers Swellegant tutorial.  In my haste I forgot instructions for adding the patina. The patina is supposed to be added when the
Swellegant Metal Coating is still wet but I forgot and let it dry. Then I put on the patina and went to the meeting. When I came back to the studio, instead of a beautiful flowering verdigris color, I had zip, nada, nothing...
 

 As you can see this is a real a lackluster veneer. There are a few sparkly bits, but overall pretty flat and lifeless. I figured what the heck, last time I had a butt-ugly veneer, I was able to save it. I quickly made a dagger pendant using it and a tiny bit of leftover pink veneer. It came out of the oven pretty ugly, and I thought for sure it was going into the trash.

That is when the surprise happened. When I added the glaze, all of a sudden the invisible patina blossomed.
    See the pretty blue patches ... they weren't there till I brushed on the varnish.

I am going to have to experiment to discover if this was just a fluke or if I can reproduce it.

Playing with Swellegant

Sometimes I forget that I even have a blog. Facebook seems to be where everyone communicates anymore. I am getting better at using FB, now that Twitter is were a lot of people talk or whatever twitter does.
   Anyway, I finally had a quiet day at the Gallery of Ocean Shores where I was able to spend time playing with polymer clay and Swellegant.  Debbie Crothers has written wonderful tutorials using Swellegant to create interesting veneers and beads. I just had to try it!

    First step: create the veneer. So much fun.

 Next step.  Create pieces from the veneers: apologies for the background... don't have my photo booth set up at the new house yet. These were taken on the windowsill.

 

 This poor little flower was my first attempt at cracking.  I overheated the clay and when I picked it up,  the poor thing cracked and broke in several places.   So it was backed with a bit of black clay and turned in to a pendant.

Another veneer I overheated while attempting to crackle.  I just kept pushing it into the clay core hoping that it would not crumble in my hands.  Miracle!  It held together.

Got into creating Dagger pendants with the next several veneers.  I am getting the hang of crackling. 

 Don't know if you can see the subtle coloring the Swellegant made on the black portion of this Dagger pendant.  In real life,  it is quite striking.

And my last beads ... to start with, this was the ugliest veneer I had made.  I had dug into the clay in an experiment to see what would happen.  I was not at all pleased with the result.  So, what the heck,  can't ruin it anymore.  Wrapped it around a  skewer and what do you know ... butt ulgy turned out nice.

Bronze Swellegant - Week 9/52 Earrings

 Been busy with some early spring cleaning... starting with the bookshelves.  I can't believe that I actually am saying this, but I have too many books! I have a set of shelves for them, but it is up on the wall above a desk. Hard to get to without a ladder.  Any book I get down, I have a hard time getting back into the ranks as the books collapse in on themselves.  I want to move them to a more convenient  location but in order to do so, DH says that we have to weed out and  ::choke:: get rid of  other books to make room.  Let me explain ....  I LOVE my books, they are like old friends that I visit again and again. I have gotten rid of books in the past that I regretted, some went out of print (still looking for the 5th book in the "True Game" series).  *sigh*  ... at least we get store credit at Page Two. 

This has been a very hard task, but if I want more room in the studio.... I must persevere.  Lord Opuson reminds me that there is always the library ....

Since I have been busy lately, I stayed simple with my weekly earring design.  I used discs from the Swellegant experiments.  I really like the look of Verdigris patina on the Bronze discs.

Swellegant

I love Christi Friesen, so when she talked about a product that would help to simulate metal on polymer clay AND give it a real patina look, I was very curious.  Then I saw some lovely pieces on Flickr by various artists who were working with it  (esp Randee aka ketztx4me), and I knew I just had to try it.   A quick visit to CF Originals and several anxious days waiting by the mailbox ... and I was ready to play.

I sprung for the whole kit, as it would be cheaper in the long run.  Look how much came packed in the box. There are 5 metal coatings, 3 patinas, a TON of dyes, application material and a sealer. If I had one complaint, I wish that the bottle of sealer was bigger.  I can see me going through sealer quickly.

My first tests were to see how the patinas reacted with various metal coatings.  I started with Brass, Copper and Bronze.  Silver and Iron will have to wait a while.  I made them in duplicate so they would make good earrings if I liked how they looked.  Learned an important lesson here which I will pass on to you.  If you want to make two pieces look the same - when you are ready for the final coat and patina, do both pieces at the same time. Otherwise the timing will be off and the intensity of the patina will not be the same.  (See if you can find which pair I learned this lesson on)

LOVE THIS COMBO!

Some day I will figure out how to put two pictures side by side on blogger.  I am so excited about the possibilities and I haven't even tried the dyes yet!