How it all began..

Do you remember me telling you about my parents coming down... and the fact that the kids and my Dad found a Barbie on the beach......Well...... this is what became of the Barbie. Turns out it is Mulan and not Barbie, which has made it rather hard to cast a mold of her face. Her face is squishy so when I pushed her head into the mold, her face became flat..... I thought it was funny, so I went ahead and made a cast from it.... The cast is on the left....

In between things last week, I also received this in the mail- The silver man coin:) And so I have made a mold using him, too....

You can see what happened to Mulan's body here..... the first few casts I made I did not include the neck and I really didn't like them, so I went back and made another mold including her neck...I'm using scrap polymer clay for both the molds and the casts. (Hope I'm using the right word, or I'm gonna sound like a big dummy! lol)

I used salt to create the textures.... With the mold I pushed regular salt into it before baking it... and when it came out of the toaster oven, I washed the salt out. Then after I made the cast I pushed big salt(sea salt) into the casts and baked them. When they came out of the over, I just plucked out the salt. Some times you can't get the salt out, which is fine, just run it under warm water and scrub it out with an old toothbrush. By using 2 different kinds of salt, at 2 different times, you create texture that sticks out and some that is pushed in.... You'll understand with the next set of pictures.....

Here's the man coin again.... and the mold I made, and a cast from it.
All of them got one coat of Gesso.... and then were painted with the first coats of color.

Oh.... and I just use regular water as a release agent....

Next post I'll have the finished 'Art pieces'!!

Until Next Time......

Guess What??

My Brother in Law fixed my computer! How awesome was that:)

So now that I've spent all day playing with my pictures, thought I'd take the time to show you a few:)

Recently we took Cora to summer camp, and on the way, managed to stop and see a few things. Our first stop was at Luray Caverns......

I know you can't really tell what much is......I took a lot of close up photos cause I was more interested in the texture and colors of things...

I LOVE all the surfaces.....

And the shift in colors....And the tones of colors.....

((Feel free to click on any of these images to make them bigger...there's so many layers in these photos!!))

The next image reminds me of polymer clay, You know when you make a "mokume gane" cane and take slices off of it....

I almost want to say these are called Draperies..... And again.....Another texture that stimulates the eye:)
** (You can't touch anything in the cavern, so it's all eye-candy in here)

Love the 'wet flowy' look here.....So many 'waterfalls'!

Took this photo for the colors.......Don't they remind you of marble, or wood or leather.....

And here's one looking down into one of those colorful rock thingies.....

Hope you enjoyed this inspiration..........

I'm ready to repaint the whole trailer because of it, Bah hahaha....

Check it out!

HI! I just wanted to drop off a website I just found for us polymer clay artists. I was just starting to run out of fresh ideas, and then I stumbled across this. Perfect!

http://www.beadyeyedbrat.com/tutescolortech.html

Have fun!