Polymer Clay Skinner Blend and Leaf Cane Tutorial
Published On: 01-11-2012 10:09am
Comments: 1 - Hits: 302
Category: Crafty Stuff
Hello, and welcome to my very first polymer clay tutorial! Today I will be showing you a step-by-step guide to creating a skinner blend (gradient color sheet) with polymer clay. We will then take the skinner blend and turn it into a leaf cane. Special thanks to my friend Andrea Dudley for taking the pictures, as I could not handle my camera with clay hands. Some shots are a bit blurry, but you'll get the gist of it. We did the best we could with the lighting I use in my clay area.
I have benefited very much from tutorials, how-to's, and tips/tricks for polymer clay across the web. Now I can start giving some of that knowledge back as I learn!
Okay, so you will need a rolling machine and blades for this project. I began with two wads of clay, one olive, and one a bright lime/kelly mix. I used a combination of Premo and Sculpey III. The olive came from taking a mucky mix of scrap and dyeing it with alcohol inks. Reduce, re-use, recycle! Choose two colors for your skinner blend. You will get the most dramatic effect by fading a really dark into a really light color. It is possible to blend 3 or even four colors in a skinner, but we're not going into that here yet.
I conditioned my clays and ran them through my rolling machine at the 1 or 2 thickness setting (Nicole brand machine). I cut a square from each color as large as I could make it, and then made a diagonal slice, leaving me with two triangles of each green. Notice the cut I made is offset at the corners:
I did the same with the olive green, and then put the opposing colors together like this:
What about the two other triangles? I double them up. Put the kelly on the kelly and the olive on the olive, remembering to match the offset corners just as they are. The reason I double it up is because I already started with a relatively small amount of clay, and I'm going to wind up with a pretty small cane. For beginners and people starting out with only a few packs of clay, you may be reluctant to use large amounts at once. I have to make myself be brave and jump in with larger amounts because...the larger a cane you start off with, the easier it will be to make lots of neat details!
Now, sort of press your triangles together a bit where they meet so as to bind them together. You can run a roller or brayer over it to help:
Next, fold the square in half, bottom to top, once, and run it through your clay machine at its thickest or second thickest setting.
Fold, repeat, fold repeat. Always folding the same way, and always putting it into the machine folded side first.
You might be getting worried, you might think it's stripey, but have no fear. The gradient will soon appear.
Repeat, repeat, repeat...
...and look what happens! It might not look so dramatic in this shot, but the blend is really lovely. Brighter green on one end, more natural blue-pine on the other.
I cut the edges so I now have a more even-ish rectangle. Now, at this point is where I've had confusion. Some artists jelly roll this strip from light to dark or dark to light. But mine always looks like a bulls-eye cane when I do that. Think about the direction you want your gradient color to go in before proceeding to the next step. Some will fold their strip accordion style, being careful to not trap air between the folds. You can also thin this strip out in your machine (before cutting like above), and then roll into a log so that light is at one end and dark at the other. You would then have to pinch/squeeze toward the center (opposite of reducing).
I'm going a different route:
I cut my strip lengthwise and stacked one on the other. Now I'm going down the strip, making 1/4 inch cuts:
Keep everything in order (important!) and stack this way:
I slowly squeeze and shape my stack into a cylinder:
I set the cylinder aside to condition the clay I will now use to turn this into a leaf cane. I took some bluish gray scrap and mixed it with a bit of black scrap. I put this through my machine at about the 4 or 5 thickness setting. While I was preparing that, the cylinder had some time to rest and cool off. Now I'm going to take it and make a cut:
The following image is a bit blurry, but I took the green piece that I cut from above, and laid it down on the blackish sheet that I rolled at 4 or 5:
I cut around that, to do this:
Repeat, inserting sheets of the contrasting color for the veins of your leaf cane:
Now you're going to take your blade and make a diagonal cut across your cylinder:
Insert one more sheet of vein, but when you put the pieces back together, you're going to flip one first, so that your lines now converge:
I rolled my remaining blackish clay through the machine slightly thinner, and did a final wrap of the whole log. Gently roll and stretch to reduce to the size you want your cane to be, and slice away!
Notes: There are things you can get away with doing leaf canes that wont work with others. If the part where I pinched along the log to make the top part of my leaf is not perfectly centered, it still looks pretty. With other designs such distortion may not look as cool. Most canes should be allowed to rest and cool thoroughly before reducing, and again before slicing. I have ruined some of my caning attempts by trying to reduce too fast! Iris Mishly has some great advice to give in this video, which shows you how to minimize distortion.
I hope you've enjoyed my tutorial! I will write another soon, and show you what I have made with this pretty gradient leaf cane.
I have benefited very much from tutorials, how-to's, and tips/tricks for polymer clay across the web. Now I can start giving some of that knowledge back as I learn!
Okay, so you will need a rolling machine and blades for this project. I began with two wads of clay, one olive, and one a bright lime/kelly mix. I used a combination of Premo and Sculpey III. The olive came from taking a mucky mix of scrap and dyeing it with alcohol inks. Reduce, re-use, recycle! Choose two colors for your skinner blend. You will get the most dramatic effect by fading a really dark into a really light color. It is possible to blend 3 or even four colors in a skinner, but we're not going into that here yet.
I conditioned my clays and ran them through my rolling machine at the 1 or 2 thickness setting (Nicole brand machine). I cut a square from each color as large as I could make it, and then made a diagonal slice, leaving me with two triangles of each green. Notice the cut I made is offset at the corners:
I did the same with the olive green, and then put the opposing colors together like this:
What about the two other triangles? I double them up. Put the kelly on the kelly and the olive on the olive, remembering to match the offset corners just as they are. The reason I double it up is because I already started with a relatively small amount of clay, and I'm going to wind up with a pretty small cane. For beginners and people starting out with only a few packs of clay, you may be reluctant to use large amounts at once. I have to make myself be brave and jump in with larger amounts because...the larger a cane you start off with, the easier it will be to make lots of neat details!
Now, sort of press your triangles together a bit where they meet so as to bind them together. You can run a roller or brayer over it to help:
Next, fold the square in half, bottom to top, once, and run it through your clay machine at its thickest or second thickest setting.
Fold, repeat, fold repeat. Always folding the same way, and always putting it into the machine folded side first.
You might be getting worried, you might think it's stripey, but have no fear. The gradient will soon appear.
Repeat, repeat, repeat...
...and look what happens! It might not look so dramatic in this shot, but the blend is really lovely. Brighter green on one end, more natural blue-pine on the other.
I cut the edges so I now have a more even-ish rectangle. Now, at this point is where I've had confusion. Some artists jelly roll this strip from light to dark or dark to light. But mine always looks like a bulls-eye cane when I do that. Think about the direction you want your gradient color to go in before proceeding to the next step. Some will fold their strip accordion style, being careful to not trap air between the folds. You can also thin this strip out in your machine (before cutting like above), and then roll into a log so that light is at one end and dark at the other. You would then have to pinch/squeeze toward the center (opposite of reducing).
I'm going a different route:
I cut my strip lengthwise and stacked one on the other. Now I'm going down the strip, making 1/4 inch cuts:
Keep everything in order (important!) and stack this way:
I slowly squeeze and shape my stack into a cylinder:
I set the cylinder aside to condition the clay I will now use to turn this into a leaf cane. I took some bluish gray scrap and mixed it with a bit of black scrap. I put this through my machine at about the 4 or 5 thickness setting. While I was preparing that, the cylinder had some time to rest and cool off. Now I'm going to take it and make a cut:
The following image is a bit blurry, but I took the green piece that I cut from above, and laid it down on the blackish sheet that I rolled at 4 or 5:
I cut around that, to do this:
Repeat, inserting sheets of the contrasting color for the veins of your leaf cane:
Now you're going to take your blade and make a diagonal cut across your cylinder:
Insert one more sheet of vein, but when you put the pieces back together, you're going to flip one first, so that your lines now converge:
I rolled my remaining blackish clay through the machine slightly thinner, and did a final wrap of the whole log. Gently roll and stretch to reduce to the size you want your cane to be, and slice away!
Notes: There are things you can get away with doing leaf canes that wont work with others. If the part where I pinched along the log to make the top part of my leaf is not perfectly centered, it still looks pretty. With other designs such distortion may not look as cool. Most canes should be allowed to rest and cool thoroughly before reducing, and again before slicing. I have ruined some of my caning attempts by trying to reduce too fast! Iris Mishly has some great advice to give in this video, which shows you how to minimize distortion.
I hope you've enjoyed my tutorial! I will write another soon, and show you what I have made with this pretty gradient leaf cane.
By CreativeCritters on 01/11/2012 @ 12:02pm
This is great tutorial! Thanks so much for sharing! =)