Gradient colour mixing

Tags

colour mixing, Fimo, gradient, polymer clay, skinner blend

I mentioned in my previous post that keeping my colour recipes in percentages helped with mixing gradients.

Sometimes I don’t keep track of my gradient mixes. The one above is made up of coordinating scraps of colour…

which becomes a lovely skinner blend…

that ends up as beads.

At other times e.g. for the Art Bead Scene challenge pieces, I want my gradient to include specific colours to match the inspiration painting.

Here are my colour recipes using Fimo Classic:

• Brick = 25% bordeaux, 25% yellow, 50% white
• Rust = 10% bordeaux, 90% yellow
• Mustard = 2.5% bordeaux, 47.5% yellow, 50% white

I take my grid paper, and using 1 square to represent 10% of the recipe, I mark out the target colours. I leave spaces between them to allow for a gradient blend. I chose to put the bordeaux in the middle for the mustard colour on the right because it was such a small percentage I thought it would be difficult to cut accurately if it were on the bottom.

Then I mark diagonals for the blends. I chose to fade to white on the edges.

Then I cut out the paper shapes to use as a template for the clay.

Here is the resulting blend. I’ve included the target colours – there is a slight difference as the swatches have been baked while the blend is still raw. This method means I can mix the colours at the same time that I make the blend (instead of mixing the 3 colours separately and then blending them).

And here are the beads I made (with an additional magenta colour).

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Rustic stack beads

Tags

beads, earring, free tutorial, gradient, handmade, necklace, polymer clay, rustic, Sonya Girodon

I was inspired by Sonya Girodon’s necklace “Skeleton Coast“ to make beads by stacking layers of polymer clay.

I was quite pleased with my efforts at the time but unfortunately now that I look at them in comparison to hers they look horribly juvenile. Or maybe it’s just because I’m having an “everything I do is horrible” day? 😦

Gradient stack bead earrings by Cate van Alphen

Earrings with dangle by Cate van Alphen

Anyway check out Sonya’s work, she even shares a tutorial for making beads similar to the focal ones in the necklace.

My first polymer

Tags

buttons, cane, gradient, kaleidoscope, pendant, polymer clay, reducing

I’ve just been invited to a new Flickr group, Your No.1, sharing the first things we made in polymer clay. I thought I’d show them here too. I started off fairly reasonably with something simple – buttons to match a multicoloured cardigan I was knitting.

Success! I managed to get the colours matching pretty well and they are not too mutant either (I did make a mold off an existing button to get them all consistent).

Then I got more ambitious and decided to make a complex kaleidoscope cane… less successfully.

The main error with this cane was that I didn’t cut the ends off after reducing. I added scrap to the ends which got sucked into the centre of the flower cane as it reduced so when I cut it to make the kaleidoscope repeat I ended up using bad cane throughout. (Also note the poor photo taken in direct sunlight).

This detail image shows more clearly the problem. There are supposed to be two flower canes surrounded by concentric circles mirrored along the yellow diagonal. The lower flower has a blob of scrap obscuring half of it and the top one has almost completely disappeared and is mysteriously much smaller.

I do like the colours in this one so perhaps I should see if I can make something similar again. Hopefully my skills have improved a bit since 2009.