"Elements Entwined" Journal

Hello everyone and welcome!

Let me present you my my "Elements Entwined" journal which I particularly enjoyed making as I had discovered some new techniques while making it. 

Again, during Christmas period I do receive quite a lot of Christmas orders and so this was is not an exception. I was quite pleased that I have received quite a few local UK based orders. It's good to be appreciated by people from your own continent as usually it's American people and people from Australia that did order a lot before from me. So I am glad that UK customers did join them this year. 

So the mission for this project was to create some fire and water Yin Yang inspired artwork. That was all I knew. Luckily my customer didn't order it to be a Yin Yang shape in particular and so I had some space for inspiration. 

I have used couple of  stock images from google as my main inspiration and while there is nothing special in these pictures, they really helped me to understand what exactly I wanted to show on the journal. I wanted the water and the fire to be more than just that. I wanted them to look decorative. 

So  everything started with black clay base and white clay for the elements. I knew that this project will require quite a strong and powerful colour effect and I wasn't sure I will be able to achieve it by using colourful clay. I admit I am not as strong in using all sorts of polymer clay effects and I prefer to use clay for sculpting and then paint it over. I have noticed that my style right now is undergoing some changes where I am discovering some new techniques, tools, materials, ways of painting with inks and acrylics and even liquid polymer clay.  So there it was, just a black and white object, but I did make sure that I made all the necessary volumes and textures on it before colouring. 

The first step for me is always sort of a trial. I use inks and I do use lighter, sort of more transparent colours, just to set the colours in, to understand how the design will look and so on. When I like what I made, then I add up some more shadows, deeper and brighter colours and then I bake my artwork. 

As you can see, I am using a transparent film as a palette for my inks. this way I can clearly see the colour and the inks don't get absorbed into paper. You can also use a white plate I guess but make sure you won't eat from it again. 

So for this composition I used Piñata Inks in red and yellow (can't remember if I mixed orange or used Piñata orange as well).. And for the blues I used blue ink from Piñata and a little bit of Adirondack ink in Mermaid colour. I was quite pleased with the result and I knew I will be enchanting these colours later after the first bake. 

For the water - wave effect I have used this photo to get inspired from colours and to see how to create the foam.  Waves do fascinate me a lot and by looking at them you can see so much detail, lovely constellations of foam, strands of foam, perfect turquoise teal ocean wave colour burst and lovely little shimmery droplets on the very tops of the waves. PERFECTION!Love waves! 

After the baking was done I added up extra tones, made sure that the colors are strong, vivid and consistent ( I used Reeves, Liquitex acrylic 

paints for that). The little ribbons and swirls of fire got covered with 18K Gold Leaf  pen from Krylon. I love this pen. It's quite pricey but it's perfect as it uses real gold powder and it shines so much more than gold acrylic paint I have. 

For the silver-white wave foam I have used same marker but in Silver tone. I have also added up some crushed pearls on the bumpy parts of the water foam. And the actual foam was made from Pardo Translucent clay. First I made it from a lot of coral look-a-like clay pieces and then I texturised it with a very fine ball tool to create more bubbles. 

After all the colours were set, I decided to experiment and I used liquid clay (brushed it over the fire and water areas). Baked again, of course. It gave it this interesting depth and some nice satin shine. I have also implemented some crushed crystals into it while the clay was still liquid and baked it all together. Unfortunately crushed crystals ended up being very sharp and so I had to rip some of them off and cover the others with more varnish and liquid clay as safety comes first! I didn't want my client to cut his fingers! 

And so by the end of this project I came up with this journal which I was quite pleased with as I haven't yet done anything from clay that represented realistically looking fire and water and even if fire does only look real in the photos or real life, I knew that my fire will be fore of a decorative one and I was happy with the result.  ENJOY!

Thank you so much for reading till the end, 

Namaste ॐ