Convoluted Explanations. . . .

Well, it's the 13th May. Ooh, Friday the 13th ;-) not that that has ever bothered me particularly. Anyway, despite my silence on this platform I have still been following my fascinations, albeit alongside interruptions from our house selling and buying ongoing process. Just to give you some context, we are moving further out into the country, we are in the throes os selling our house and buying another, solicitors, surveys etc. It all takes time and makes you feel totally powerless, which is not good, so I am glad I have things I can achieve results from in fairly short order.

I decided to try using some of my more faux organic digital images to transfer onto poly clay, further contorting and exploring the idea of presumed 'reality. I'm playing with the idea that it could be hard to tell what part of the object is the result of a physical process and what part is the result of digital manipulation that echoes the results of a physical process. 

The images I make use the mathematics that impersonates or echoes naturally occurring forms and distribution of forms. The dread word 'Fractal' has to used at this point. I don't mean the swirly, exactly similar but decreasing in size, rainbow coloured things that you used to see everywhere years ago, I mean what are known as 'Random Fractals'. These have the same self similarity and iterations of scale as the swirly ones, ('Deterministic fractals' I have been told is the name of those Mandlebrot Set type ones) but they repeat in a random way, so you get a similar shape or form repeating at various sizes in randomly determined places, making a pattern that repeats, but not exactly, and not in a strict geometric layout. Kind of faux 'natural'.

The image transfer process and further deliberate 'ageing' be me, brings my own physical impersonation of natural processes, such as decay and random attrition, into the equation. 

So I am making a digital image that looks like some unspecified natural form, digitally manipulating it to make it look decayed or degraded in some way, bringing it into the physical by printing and transferring it onto poly clay, then physically manipulating the surface to make it look decayed and degraded, which is itself a random fractal process. . . .

And they look cool, which is the main point ;-) Though why 'faux ancient' is considered desirable is not something I have yet fully worked out. . (I consider it desirable but haven't delved into that one yet)

My texture sheets are made in the same way, using the same kind of images made into texture stamps/sheets.

It's all fascinating stuff, arguably. I really enjoy messing about at both ends of the process - on my computer and on my work table. there is no shortage of stuff to explore.
Below is some more recent stuff you may have seen on FB or in my Etsy shop, but it's always worth a second look of course ;-)
cheers,
J x

Cheap prints!

I extended my price realism still further - to my Tiles and Coasters shop. I have had abstract prints for sale on there for a fair few months now and though they have accumulated a fair number of faves and views, none have sold.

This is a shame, so, in the spirit of 'realism' referred to earlier, I have knocked the prices down by about 40%. This may result in nothing whatever changing, but at least I will know that it isn't the price that is putting people off buying.
Jon x

Image Transfer - more musings

Having been somewhat obsessed with rolling my image mapped bits of clay round tube beads, I decided to change focus for a bit and try using the flat images as just that, flat images. As the designs suggest tiles, and were initially created to echo tile designs in the real world I made what you might call tile beads with them.
I used a technique that Claire Maunsell shared a while back, for making hollow beads using cutters of different sizes, to construct a few square, hollow, double sided tile beads.

Basically, you transfer a couple of images using the water and index finger attrition method described in my previous post, making sure the image is slightly smaller than the larger of your two cutters.Then you cut out a couple of blank squares the same thickness as your image trans squares. Then, taking the smaller cutter, chop out the middle of the two (or more if you want a thicker bead) blank squares. Make sure your image squares are dry and not going to smudge ( I put a coat of Klear floor polish on them ) put the first one face down on your work surface, stack the two blank squares with the centres chopped out on top and finish off with the second image square face up. Gently push together without squashing or distorting.

Make a hole about 3/4 of the way up what will be the vertical side of your bead when strung, on both sides in order to allow string/thong to be threaded through, poke a barbq skewer or suchlike mandrel through the holes to suspend the bead on whatever kind of rack you use when baking, then bake. . .
Being me I had to mess around with them after baking. I painted the sides with alcohol ink and then gently sanded the top and bottom where the ink had encroached onto those surfaces. As they had been varnished and fired the sanding didn't erode the images as long as I was careful, but did take away some of the ink, giving a nice, faux ancient effect.
I'm really pleased with how they turned out and am going to mess around some more with this technique, when I get some time. . .
cheers,
Jon x

Image transfer musings

I've spent a fair few hours wrestling with various forms of image transfer onto Polymer Clay over the past few months. I have various (hundreds. . . ) of cool images that I created digitally by various means, that I have wanted to get off the computer and onto any substrate that will take them. Getting them onto Polymer Clay seemed an interesting challenge.
My explorations so far have been aimed at trying to get images onto raw clay that I could then manipulate by wrapping them round things. Most of the brighter and crisper ways of transferring images all seemed to involve baking the clay, or blasting liquid clay with a heat gun. OK in their way but you are left with a stiff, flat thing that is unwrappable.
The only way I found to transfer onto raw clay was the one that Donna Kato mentions in her book on Creative Surface Effects. It involves using a laser print, (it doesn't work with inkjets) and water. Several people have Youtube vids of this technique too. Basically you place the image face down on a bit of clay, rub/burnish the back of it to make sure the image is in good contact with the clay surface, then, using water and your index finger, rub gently-ish until the paper rubs off. This leaves you with the image that was once on the paper, now imprinted on the surface of the clay. There are various subtleties to it but in a nutshell, that's what you do.
What I then tried was to wrap that image around a pre-made tube bead, either baked or unbaked. The problem I encountered was that the image stuck to my fingers and smudged badly. OK, I tried hardly touching the image when wrapping, but that was very hard to do as some pressure and guidance is needed to get the wrap at the right angle etc.
I tried this technique with trans clay. The image stuck to the clay better, and much less to my fingers, but the resultant image looked a bit faded and dull somehow.

Early experiments

So I thought a bit and decided to try a mix of trans and white clay, white for the image quality and trans for the relative handleability. I tried about 80% white to 20% trans. This was better and I got some reasonable results, with the caveat that I wasn't going for anything pristine, I liked the wonky, cheap transfer/ancient artifact/rustic vibe I was getting, I just didn't want smudged images.
On a whim I tried something out. .  I figured that what I needed was something in between the image and my fingers that would protect it from smudging when being handled, so I tried a thin coat of Klear floor polish brushed on. This worked OK up to a point. . .
The issue with the basic laser print/water technique is that when left, over time the ink gets stickier and the clay gets stiffer and likely to crack when being wrapped. Putting a thin layer of weak varnish on helps with the first problem, but not so much with the latter, you have to try to judge when the varnish is dry enough to handle but that it hasn't dried to the extent that it will crack when wrapped.
I have had some success with this but still have to handle it as little as I can as the act of wrapping seems to re awaken the stickiness somehow. It's also not consistent enough for me to draw firm conclusions about what I am doing. I feel it sort of works, most of the time ;-)
Any of you found better methods?
Jon x

Sold Something. . .

At a local art show. I entered a few of my framed, printed tiles in a 'Well why not?' sort of mood, and when I turned up today to pick up my work, was agreeably surprised to find that I had sold one of my special 3 -tiles-in-a-frame ones. One of my seemingly Art Nouveau derived ones.

Though the 'Art Nouveau' is actually no such thing. The shapes in my tile design that echo that famous art movement being a product of complex fractal mathematics, a finely honed skill set, experience and a creative mind that Follows the Fascination where it leads. . . I found the resemblance during my digital explorations, and pursued it ;-)

I'm glad somebody liked them enough to buy them. I like them, but I don't really count. It also shows that I finally may have the pricing about right. £75. I didn't have time to photograph them before I put them in the show but here is a quick Pshop mock-up. I shall make some more of that design. And I think I shall try a 3 tiler or two in my tiles and coasters Etsy shop.
Onwards and upwards. . . ;-)