Sunday, July 11, 2010

Oooh, I have to try this - week 26 of canes


Hi Everyone,

My good friend, Louise, who does beautiful Bottles of Hope, sent me a link to Les Ethiopiques, a francophone polymer clay artist.

Les Ethiopiques has a great tutorial on an optical illusion cane. The photo above is one of the things that she's done with it. It is in French, but there are a lot of photos so most of it should be OK. I tried looking at it with Google Translate, but the text is embedded in the photos so it doesn't translate at all. Fortunately I speak enough French that I can understand it.

When I was a teenager I had black and white optical illusion wallpaper in my room so this brings back memories. I'm looking forward to trying it but I suspect I'll have to use something other than black and white. My Kato black is very stiff and my white is very soft. I did a cane today (another post) where I leached the white and that made it a lot better, but I don't think I'll have the patience to try something as complex as this cane with the two different textures.

Suggestions for colour choices are welcome. I'm leaning towards a deep green as my colour choice for one colour, but I haven't decided what to do for the other colour.

Les Ethiopiques is a prolific blogger and she's got 18 tutorials on her blog which is pretty wonderful considering the blog only got started in February. For whatever reason, the link to all of the tutorials doesn't show up unless you read it in Google Translate, then it's off on the right side-bar. And now that I've been looking at it, it sometimes shows up on the non-translated blog, but not always. One of the ones that I want to try from her tutorials is the stained glass beads. She has a great kaleidoscope cane tutorial as well and what to do with the scrap which is something that I've seen a few times but can never remember what to do with so it's great that I've got the link now.

The one thing that blows me away about Les Ethiopique's website is that she's very good about putting things together and showing finished products with her work. And it's beautiful! I wish I were as disciplined.

While it helps to be able to read French, it's not a requirement to enjoy the pretty pictures on her blog. I hope you swing by and scroll through some of the images. I'm sure she'll provide some wonderful inspiration.

Cheers,

Sandy

2 comments:

Debbie Bellibone Goodrow said...

Why not deep green and white? Gorgeous.

Isabel Hinther said...

I like green and purple together, but I'm not sure if it'll work with 'deep' green. The green and white sounds nice.
I agree with you about Les Ethiopiques. It's my favourite blog and my 'go to' for interesting tutorials. She's so generous about sharing her ideas. Tried the leather with 'zippers' necklace and it turned out quite well.