Hello Everyone,
Today's topic is more about resources than about technique since I did a direct copy of something I saw that I liked.
We get the Signals Catalogue at home and I fell in love with this plaque a while ago for whatever reason. However, it's $90 and only made out of resin. If it had been made out of pewter or other metal I might have purchased it from the catalogue.
But, I have these wonderful metallic powders from Daniel Smith (if you're at all a painter you should visit the site and they have some really neat textured papers that I'm thinking about ordering) and a ton of scrap clay so I thought I would make one for myself instead. These powders are a little different from the Perfect Pearls and Pearl Ex powders in that you can do blending one colour on top of another so you can get the subtle shifts of colour. You do have to seal the clay afterwards because the pigment does rub off after a while. All I needed was a way of putting the letters into the clay.
We're lucky enough in our Southern Ontario Polymer Clay Guild to have Bev Larose who has a printing company. She's been generating custom stamps for us for a while at the incredibly reasonable price of $10 for a 6 inch by 4 inch stamp (and as an added bonus, if she likes the stamp well enough she'll let you have it for free as long as you let her make as many as she wishes). So, I had her make me a stamp of this and made my own plaque. She's developing a website and once she gets it up and running I'll make sure it gets posted here. I also had her make me a Christmas stamp which I'm going to use in the Clayamies Christmas ornament swap.
Here's my first attempt. I love the torn edges of mine. One thing that is really obvious is the roller marks on the clay from my Mona Kissel Atlas Pasta Machine (but I think it's common to most machines and I wouldn't give up this pasta machine for twice what I paid for it). I find that it leaves these marks at the thicker pasta machine settings. I'll play around some more to see if I can get rid of the marks. I tried brayering it but that wasn't very successful.
There are some subtle differences between mine and Signals in the emphasis of the words which I hadn't realized until I posted the photos side by side.
Overall I'm happy with the concept, just have to perfect it a bit by getting rid of the roller marks. I have lots of clay and lots of powder so I'm sure it'll come together. I rarely so obviously plagiarize a product but I do like having it around.
Cheers,
Sandy
3 comments:
Cool stamp, & the mix of metallics is nice.
You can smooth out those roller marks with a sheet of deli wrap. If you didn't get any, scarf a piece off a guild buddy!
Hi Marla,
Thanks for the tip - I'll have to try that. Figured it was something simple.
The Marla Method was a success! The class was able to use it very easily. I'm so thankful to you for giving me the idea.
Sandy
You know, I kind of think the lines in it actually work. It's a very simple texture and it isn't obvious that it was unintentional.
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