It’s that time of year, the days are getting darker and shorter and I’m not feeling very arty.  I am still aimlessly doodling on my iPad.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these, possibly small elements may show up in my jewelry.

This one reminds me of bizarro Easter eggs:

This one is simple, but I love it.  A handy feature of iDraw is the ability to save custom shapes.

I think this one has a lot of potential in the individual elements.

Original article: Still Doodling on My iPad

©2013 Libzoid - art jewelry by Libby Mills. All Rights Reserved.

A couple of years ago, during one of my creative slumps, I got caught up in the Zentangle craze. It was a wonderful way to infuse a small amount of creativity into my daily routine. When I needed some line art for making polymer clay tear away textures, I simply scanned a collection of my favorite tiles. (Btw, if you would like directions on how to do polymer clay tear away texture, Celie Fago has excellent instructions in her book on KeumBoo on Silver)

Unfortunately, the drawn lines on my old Zentangle tiles were simply too thin for the tear away technique. While I was pondering how best to draw some new art, it occurred to me that my iPad would be a great tool for doodling and manipulating my doodles. One of the advantages of drawing on an iPad is that you can enlarge the area you are working on, so that you get the look you want and then shrink it back to regular size.  You can also copy and repeat elements.  Ultimately you can draw a library of images which can then be used at a variety of sizes for different projects.  You can cut and paste and combine elements from several drawings into one.  Here are my favorite apps for iPad doodling:

SpiroDoodle makes fun kaleidoscope like doodles. It’s inexpensive at just $0.99.  It’s really easy. You can change the number of points as well as the width of the line.  You can also use color, but for my purposes, all I’ve needed is black.

 iDraw is a very powerful vector drawing app.  It’s pricey at $8.99, but it is really versatile.  The documentation is limited but helpful.  For doodling purposes, just playing around with it helped.  I had some trouble saving the images as jpegs, but was able to email an image to myself as a jpeg and then download it.  I like the variety of available shapes and the ease with which you can select and group items.  The ability to select and scale objects is what sets this app above the other more basic apps I tried.

 Moodboard is an app I use for making color collages, drawings of necklace design ideas and inspiration sheets. It’s also expensive at $9.99, but I really like it.   Since I already use this app, it was a quick way for me to group images in varying sizes on a single sheet for photocopying.  Then I can use the photocopies for polymer clay tear away textures of transfers or as a resist for electro etching metal.

 TypeDrawing was another fun app discovery.  You can make text follow along a path with iDraw, but with TypeDrawing, you can type in some text and doodle with words! The number of fonts you can use is limited, but it is a lot of fun.  I am working on a project that stems from my frequent difficulties speaking the wrong word or forgetting words, and this app is perfect for the project.

Photoshop Express from Adobe is the last of my favorite apps for doodling.  It’s a wonderful photo editing app, and it’s the quickest way I have found to invert my black and white images.  For tear aways, the images need to be inverted so that the background is black and the lines are white.  It’s a one click operation in PSE and the app is free!

Original article: Apps for Doodling on the iPad

©2013 Libzoid - art jewelry by Libby Mills. All Rights Reserved.

Bethel, Vermont – misty morning view from the B&B

Ok, this is the third time I have tried to write this post.  I don’t usually have technical difficulties with Google Chrome or with WordPress, but apparently I am so woefully out of practice writing on this blog, now I am having trouble I never experienced before.

Recently, I traveled to Vermont, land of my college days to take a four day workshop on working with bronze metal clay at the home studio of artist Celie Fago. It was lovely visiting Vermont in the Fall.  A couple of weeks past peak, I positively soaked up the smells and sights and general ambiance.

Grace Hill Farm, which sadly doesn’t have a web site.

I stayed in a wonderful Bed & Breakfast, a first for me.  I enjoyed the social aspect of chatting with other guests over breakfast or an evening fire.  The innkeeper’s adorable yorkshire terrier was a delightful and tiny treat.  The almost complete absence of a cell signal and a very intermittent wifi signal were frustrating, but being unplugged isn’t all bad.

My fired bronze clay links.  I chickened out and didn’t join them.  I’m thinking of joining them with peyote stitch bands eventually.

I’m on the fence about working with bronze clay.  I haven’t done much with any metal clay in years and I’ve always found it a bit frustrating.  The process made me itch to be work in sheet silver again.  I’m not dismissing the material entirely.  I am going to fire my last couple of pieces from the workshop and see how that goes.

We began the workshop with a half day lesson in polymer clay tear away textures.  Unfortunately the art I had brought with me to Vermont wasn’t suitable for the process.  It got me doodling on my ipad and I’ve just surfaced from spending several days doodling and tweaking black and white images.  The iPad is really great for this.  I’m going to use some of the images for tear away and some for etching metal and some for polymer clay transfers.

Original article: Interlude in Vermont

©2013 Libzoid - art jewelry by Libby Mills. All Rights Reserved.

I had a very rare (for me) spurt of bead production, getting ready for the Bead Bazaar, September 8-9.  I haven’t made enough of anything in the last few years to submit beads or pendants for the guild’s booth, and production doesn’t come easily to me.  This year I had a sizable store of ripple blade veneers from the prep I did for my demo at our retreat.  Although I really don’t love production work, I think it’s a good idea to do some occasionally.  Repeating the same basic steps many times over can really help to refine techniques, especially finishing.

Sorry about the less than stellar photos.  I only had time to take a couple of quick record shots with my iphone before I sent the beads off to my friend, Michelle, who generously organizes the details of the Bead Bazaar.  I did relearn a lot making these beads.  My finishing skills were quite rusty.  I hadn’t done much sanding and buffing in years and it was satisfying bringing up the shine on some of these beads.

My daughter took one look at my beads and asked me if I had gotten the ripple blade craze out of my system yet. lol

The answer to that is NO!, but I think I want to venture into combining the patterns with other patterns or textures.

Original article: Unusual Bead Production Spurt

©2013 Libzoid - art jewelry by Libby Mills. All Rights Reserved.

In November 2011, Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes released their ebook Relief Beyond Belief.  I’ve had time to read it several times, and to use the techniques.  I find myself referring back to it often.   Several parts of the dieforming technique have become regular bits of my bead/pendant making process. While finishing up beads for the annual Bead Bazaar, I started thinking about this book.  So… here I am, finally getting around to writing my review.

First of all, I think this is a fantastic book.  It’s possibly the best, most fully developed polymer clay technique book around, in part because of its narrow focus, but largely because of format and content the book itself.  Dan and Tracy refer to the book as a “master class” and it truly is that.  It’s a perfect road map to making beautiful dieformed beads with polymer clay.  It’s full of clear photographs and text explanations, as well as a gorgeous gallery section of finished pieces.  If you follow the instructions, you can’t help but make a beautiful and elegantly constructed bead, and you will learn a lot along the way.

One reason I wanted to write this review was that I recently heard someone comment  that they thought Relief Beyond Belief was very expensive.  Personally I think this book is a real bargain because it is a complete master level workshop.  You would have to pay at least a couple of hundred dollars to take a comparable class.  In fact, I took a version of this workshop when Dan came to Connecticut to teach a couple of years ago.  I can tell you that the ebook goes far beyond the workshop in the amount of detail and visual information. And you can go back to it again and again.  My class notes don’t even come close. I loved the process and the results when I took the workshop, but I didn’t start to really use the technique a lot until I got the ebook.

I am hoping that Dan and Tracy will come out with other ebooks because they’ve really done such a fantastic job with this first one.  The layout is graphically pleasing, logical and easy to follow.  The format is perfectly suited to use on an iPad, but I am told it’s great as a pdf on a traditional computer as well.  Clearly I admire Dan’s work and I like his teaching style.  This book is very indicative of Dan Cormier’s approach to polymer clay, lots of thought and attention to detail.

If your main focus in working with polymer clay is not jewelry, this probably isn’t the book for you.  If your style is very loose and fast-moving, you tend to create on the fly and just the thought of multiple steps makes you twitchy, it may not be your cup of tea.  But I still think it’s worth considering.  If you like very specific instructions along with explanations about why you should do certain things and not others, you’ll love this book.  If you’re interested in making polymer clay beads or jewelry, and you’re interested in taking your work to the next level, I highly recommend Relief Beyond Belief.

Original article: Dan Cormier’s Relief Beyond Belief Ebook

©2013 Libzoid - art jewelry by Libby Mills. All Rights Reserved.