103 days to go until the polymer clay cruise…

Fortunately I got a lot of programming work done this morning and afternoon, so I allowed myself some recreation time in the superShed this evening, to work with polymer clay. Unfortunately it turned into more of a fight with clay than a relaxing therapeutic session. Two hours’ worth of experimentation went straight onto the scrap pile. I was experimenting with mica shift techniques and couldn’t come up with even one decent design. Aaaaargh, frustrating!

So I gave up and tried to see if I could improve on the flower cane design that I made earlier in the week. Here is the original:

I wasn’t very happy with it because the petals aren’t very defined, and the gradiation of colours isn’t very successful. But here is my effort from today:

There is now a subtle line to separate the petals from each other, and the background isn’t as lumpy as my previous effort.

By some strange quirk, when I took this photo the lighting conditions somehow made the 2D flower look like it was a bit 3D:

I don’t think I’d be able to achieve that effect ever again, even if I tried for years!

So I’m fairly happy with today’s claying after all. Even though it felt like I wasted a couple of hours, at least I ended up with a positive feeling from the ‘before and after’ comparison of the flower canes. And although my mica-shift experiments were duds, I now have a much better idea of which techniques not to try again, so by a process of elimination I may eventually end up with a decent mica-shift design one day after all…

Here are the flower canes side by side, just to prove that I have made a bit of progress:

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