Squid!

I believe it is, I do indeed.

I accidentally made a squid today. So here it is.

This last picture is of it before baking, all propped up on foil to keep the tentacles from falling.

I used the probably-no-longer-available SuperFlex Sculpey for it, a blend of the blue and the green. The body is one lump, the fins are pinched out and shaped a little. The tentacles were rolled out of scrap and smoothed onto the body and sealed between them all with a little more scrap. The pads on the two longest are teardrop shapes smoothed on.

Bowls

Another blue bowl, and a purple one. Violated every rule in the book to get these made in one evening for gifting the next day… whatever

Color mixes

• Interior blue is 1:1 blue:silver
• Exterior blue is straight up blue
• Interior purple is 3:1 purple:silver (could cut back on the purple a little but that makes it a little too light for my tastes)
• Exterior purple is just purple
• The edges are black.
• The dragonfly is white.

Painting techniques

• Interior colors are dry brushed to get a burnished look. This involves just barely getting paint on the brush and then brushing it on as fast and thin as possible, creating many layers.
• Exterior colors were just brushed on. Since they can’t be seen, they are darker and less shiny than the interior colors and have a slightly uneven effect.
• Dragonfly- sharpened the end of a skewer to lethal sharpness and dotted the paint on to get the finest line evar.
• The varnish is two layers brushed on. I didn’t try to keep airbubbles out but my varnish is liquid enough to not hold bubbles.

Pictures-
Taken before leaving for school. Sorreh.

Swirled Egg

This is why I made the shells found Over Here.

I use them as bases to make strangely patterned (but not yet textured) eggs out of polymer clay. This one is from my swirly phase (quite a while ago, at this point) and only recently got finished after I bought varnish, sanded it properly, and made a varnishing stand for it.

The process to make one of these is pretty simple- get some idea of what you want the egg to look like, execute it, sand the living daylights out of it, varnish, and wander around looking for someone to show/sell it to.

My idea for this one came from a pen and ink drawing I did several months before that I thought would adapt well to being round. And digitized too, since I can no longer find the original scan. Executing the idea was the hardest part simply because of the amount of detail. The clay had to be rolled to about 1/8th inch thick, cut into very thin strip in some cases, and then stuck together on an egg. Then the egg is baked according to package instructions, ignored in the bottom of a box (these are pretty fragile) for a month or so, then sanded. Polymer clay has to be wet sanded, which just means that it has to be sanded in or under water, otherwise the sandpaper will clog up. It /really helps/ if you have sandpaper that doesn’t come apart when it gets wet, but if you don’t, no worries. Start with a fairly coarse grit (I’d say about twice a coarse as a new emery board) and work your way down to crocus paper (the finest sandpaper available). My crocus paper comes apart in water so I wound up using the grit and the end of my finger to sand the egg instead. That left the egg a horrible red color, but very very smooth. To get the red stain off, I used an old toothbrush and new toothpaste (a very light abrasive) to get the red out. Then I washed it off, dried it out, bent up a stand out of 10 gauge copper wire, varnished it (try not to let it drip like I did, it looks bad), and left it sitting on my desk for lack of anything better to do. I might make a real stand for it some day.

This is before I varnished it.

And this is after. I like the shiny!

I use Sculpey polymer clay and PLAID outdoor satin sealer (polyurethane).

Three Legs and a Paint Job

I did not know I could paint that well OR spontaneously sculpt like that. Miracles happen all the time!

I Wish I Could Get My Hair To Do That

spent an absolutely obscene amount of time shading and blending this… Like how it came out though!

also need to learn how to work within the confines of my giant sketchbook. I’ve gotten used to working big now and it’s getting absurd.

Shiny Blue Bowl

One standard teacup formed composite bowl done up in pretty paints and sealed for it’s protection, not yours.

The blue on the near side is the closest to the real color. In the sun it is absolutely brilliant. I did not expect the blue/silver mix to work out so well.

This time, the far side is closest to reality. This is the same blue as before not-really-mixed with white and silver in equal parts and brushed on. It’s a variation on a technique used to make real clay look like stone. Sort of.

The yellow and gold clays are a lot brighter in real life. Those are a part of the bowl, rather than an inlay or painted like the rest of the bowl. I originally intended to paint the whole bowl but the effect was too cool to pass up.

I fully expect you to all flip when I say that I’m going to use this to replace the experiment that my previous retainer dish has turned into.

Glove makin’

I am very particular about my gloves, almost to the point where I have to make them because I can’t get them anywhere else. To that end, I bought an Official Pattern from a respected pattern maker so that I could modify it to suit my needs (because it didn’t have the gloves I desired). This is that story and it is a story of trials and terrible dangers…

Corsages

This is a how-to, roughly, for someone who has *way* to much time on their hands, especially when they have *no* time at all.

so, prom is next week THREE DAYS FROM NOW (then) and you don’t have corsages and don’t want to deal with a florist ’cause you have /no idea/ what all those little flower things are and besides, corsages cost money and prom is totally a low budget op…

Apocalypse: Vitaly Samarin

I’m pretty sure Jade is responsible for this.
Vitaly Samarin does this obscenely pretty webcomic that updates every once in a long while because it is so pretty.
A unit of wikipedia syndrome later, I had a browser full of links to this guy’s work, all of which is really impressive.

the top of the wikipedia syndrome tree
The detail is impressive. I particularly like the …anything with wings
…how does he get the water to do that?

Heart Surgury SCIENCE

Yeps, this again! :D

This time the objective was to time how long it took each color to melt at what the oven calls 300 Degrees Fahrenheit. I divided 8 boxes of hearts into their individual colors, found that I could get 30 hearts of each color, made small hearts according to Evil Mad Scientist directions, put ‘em in the oven, and got out my apush hw to work on between checks.

Procedure (goes roughly like this);

• check hearts every 10 minutes until one starts melting, then check every 5
• take a picture every time I check
• repeat until they’re all melted or I have to go to bed

The downside of that is that the pink heart started doing interesting things in the first 10 minutes and then did NOTHING for the next, like, hour… blah…