Three more landscape canes - week 9 of canes

Hi Everyone,

Today I taught Mike Buessler's landscape cane technique to Guild. It was a pretty successful class - about 20 women participated to varying degrees.

Here are the three canes that I did during the class. The one on the left was the first demo on how to do a cloud within a skinner blend stack. I was happy with it and will play with it a bit more to see how it reduces. The big hit for that was how to make the dark blue that I do (Kato blue + black + purple).

I had done the upper and lower portion of the one in the middle as preparation for class and didn't put the two pieces together until class. The intent was to show that Mike's technique could also be used as the bottom for variegated land features and how to cut it into the uppper portion. I don't quite follow Mike's technique for cutting in landscape features, mine is all done with cookie cutters. I didn't have high hopes for this one but ended up being very happy with it. I am a little concerned that if I reduce it the blue sky is too much like the green of the top portion of the hills and that I'll lose the hills, but we'll see. To do it again I would put the darker green as the top.

The cane on the right was a variation of the landscape cane that I showed in an earlier post. Essentially you start out with a skinner stack and then start flip-flopping dark to light. I was inspired with this cane by Vio's technique that you can see here, but just a different variation that makes for a good cane.

I have some photos to post of some of the class results and I'll get to that later.

I really am adamant that Kato clay is the way to go when you're doing complex canes or where shape is important. Surfingcat visited my blog recently and I typically will visit someone's blog when they visit mine. I was happy to find her description of the different clays for caning here. I'm sure others that are more talented than I am can work with the softer clays but they're definitely not for me, though I do envy how much easier they are to condition.

For those in Canada a great source of Kato Clay is Shades of Clay with quick delivery and reasonable prices.

I'm starting to get off topic so I'll close down now.

Cheers,

Sandy