Month: June 2017

Great polymer clay cane ideas from nature

I was reading about organization (order in apparent chaos) for tissues cells and organelles with electron microscopy as a tool (transmission electron microscopy is what I have done for 40 years) and found a reference for chitin (someone’s blog i believe) and saw this picture of the layers of arrangement of N-acetyl-D-glucosamine (part of a chitin chain) (second ref from Cohen 1991) which has inspired me to try similar stacks of polymer clay to see if i can create a cane which upon slicing looks like the arched (which this blogger calls artifactual… probably more a visual consequence of slightly-continuously skewed orientation of molecules at a given thickness (oh wouldn’t it be fun to be someone who knew fractal equations… as they translate into DNA code).  Anyway, below is a diagram for all you polymer clay cane enthusiasts to practice with….  cane layers on the right, and the hyperbolic curves on the left…. please have fun… I cant wait to try it.

polymer clay cane approach to hyperbolic curves in slices

Dots and pink mandala pysanka egg

Not a great picture, but still one of those moments in time that I treasure, wiping the wax off a pysanka egg after its done….. thinking, will this turn out well, how badly did some areas of the egg take the die, did I plan colors correctly.  Ha ha… almost like getting a surprise gift at the end of the project.  You can see closely on this egg that I didn’t watch the amount of wax from my kistka in the white dots, as the black dye found its way into the center of the white dots.

pysanky eggs

Large yellow flower pysanky egg

This pysanka egg might have been improved with a little detail in the flower, but the background is kind of fun. Somehow I am always mentally thinking about how little time there is to do so many fun art-projects (and science as well, since that is my profession). I don’t know whether going through life “hoping to find something interesting” or “finding so many things interesting” is the worse curse/blessing. The burden lies in practice, getting better, and that takes time time time.

single yellow flower pysanka egg

BMW art cars (my 320i flower car in the middle)

Could not resist putting my first BMW art car in the midst of all these famous cars.  I think it is nice, and surely not like the others.  Two 320i cars I have painted with flowers, and one of them I used gallery glass to make dimensional flowers, but didn’t like it (the texture just kept holding the dirt and grime) so i removed it and put the BMW logo flowers on it instead.  That second car I had only just finished painting when someone ran a red light and T-boned it…. totaling it, I was so sad…  In truth, it had become such a “bare-bones” transportation vehicle, no air conditioning, seats beginning to wear out, interior rugs just thread bare, I think it was time.  So that car is posted HERE, and my first painted BMW art car is posted below. My flower car BMW is not painted by a professional car painter, LOL, but surely one who loves BMWs and flowers.

320i BMW art car flowers Marian Miller

 

Two more pysanky eggs from the late 1990s

I enjoyed doing this craft for many years, but moved to mosaic and also to polymer clay. I still have some of the dyes and am waiting for inspiration on how to combine all three types of egg decorating into a single egg. Well, maybe also add a little etching and carving. But these were fairly traditional pysanky.

pysanka dying of chicken eggs

While they are not particularly inspired, some of the chicken eggs (just from the local grocery) dyed pretty well. My guess is that currently the eggs are so treated, washed and bleached that they would be scarred and non-receptive to the dyes.

batik eggs pysanky chicken eggs decorated

Daisies and dots pysanky egg

This is kind of non-traditional pysanka, daisies and dots on a chicken egg.  It is from the mid 1990s I believe, when all my kids were doing pysanky with me, weeks on end in the spring. As I look at this it looks more like one my daughter would do than one I would do, I will ask her.

pysanky eggs daisies and dots

Large paper egg with polymer clay overlay: redo

So I posted before this small disaster, LOL, coming to grips with failures and experimental mistakes is somewhat frustrating. I cut apart that egg which wasn’t working out well, (you can see the paper inside had gotten misshapen from all the sanding with wet sandpaper I had done) and I cleaned it out, soaking off, and sanding off, the remains of the paper (it was a combination of chines news and news in english LOL).  The inside was kind of cool, and I am determined to figure out something to make this fun and interesting.

For starters I need to bolster the rather flexible polymer clay egg itself, which I suppose I should do with liquid polymer clay in a fine coat first, on the inside.  If it stabilizes enough I can sand the outside more.  I did think a little dragon (multicolored) coming out of this large egg would be fun….  i have never created a structure that would be as big as a dragon would need to be to be in proportion to this rather large (5 inch) egg.  The other option, much quicker and maybe just as cute, would be to buy a little stuffed dragon toy…  thinking.