I've decided that I'm going to try doing more Jon Anderson canes. I thought I'd ease into it by repeating my cup cane that I did a couple of years ago which you can see here.
The hard part for me was figuring out the skinner blend. Took me a long time to get that right - I cannot rotate images in my mind for anything and the big trick was to use spacers in my pasta machine to keep the blend no wider than about 2 inches. And this turned into a happy accident. When I was making the skinner blend portion of the cane I debated on whether to make a skinner blend plug using the stacking method or the roll method. I ended up using the roll method but thought for sure that I had messed up the cane by doing so. Actually though, I'm thrilled with the roll and will use that for other cane work.
The cane started off about 2 inches wide, 2.5 inches tall, and about an inch thick. As I was reducing it I ran into the same problem I've had previously which is that the white was much softer than the blue (very frustrating!). I ended up trimming some of the left cane edge off so that I could get closer to the dark blue to be able to manipulate it better and that seemed to work.
The end result is shown below. I've reduced most of the cane to about a half inch because that's the scale that I like to work with. I'm quite happy with it.
Start to finish is about 3 hours, and almost half of that was in trying to figure out the skinner blend orientation.
There are a few more Jon Anderson canes that I want to try. And while trying to find the difference between a stacked and a rolled blend I came across a wonderful website that I've not seen before. Tokens has some wonderful tutorials, and I'm particularly enthralled with their mandalas which I may have to use as inspiration for some of my work.
Cheers,
Sandy
2 comments:
Awsome cane Sandy.
Sandy did you see Hélène from les Éthiopiques is publishing this month?
Post a Comment