Probably my two favorite things to do with clay is Grunge and Scrap Clay Play. So when I photographed this grate for my daily 3×3 photo, I immediately thought “Oh yeah! Grunge and scrap clay!” I believe it was Lyn Tremblay who commented on my 3×3 post that she knew what I was up to! And Lyn, I knew when I posted that 3×3 you would see it too!
So yesterday I got out some Souffle Concrete that had accidentally got another color mixed on the back of it (Poppy Seed), but I saved – because you know, I might need it some day..
I added some Pan Pastels and a gentle sprinkle of verdigris colored embossing powder. There is a dark and medium rust color and a khaki green color in Pan Pastels. This sheet is a medium setting.
I burnished the colors down onto the surface so that when I worked with the sheet the colors wouldn’t rub off so easily.
I used these tools. The black is a piece of non-slip stair tred material (Home Depot). It textures like sand paper, but is much more durable and will go through the pasta machine. The oval cutters are “leather cutters, 39 pieces” on Amazon. They are an awesome set, but they DO rust! Lindasartspot.com carries them as well if you are on Amazon restriction like me!
So I textured a small sheet of Poppy Seed Souffle with the stair tred. I ran sheet of Poppy Seed through on #3, sprayed tred with water, and ran clay and tred through on #2 (wider).
I started out cutting with the larger oval, but realized that it was
too big. Rather than waster the dozen or so pieces I had already cut, I just used the smaller cutter to cut out the center of these pieces.
Ohhhhh, I liked the scrap…. So I set up ANOTHER piece of textured Poppy Seed and worked on both pieces at same time. Building my structured pattern on the first and the leftover pieces on the second- including the pieces that were broken to up the “grunge factor”.
This is the original grid piece that I completed with the smaller ovals and a generous sprinkle of the verdigris embossing powder.
And here is the slab piece I posted with the dali’s ballet slippers. So I worked with the positive and the negative, the structured pattern and unstructured pattern – at the same time.
Okay, after cutting out and baking here are the final pieces.
I added a warm greige color craft paint to the grid version to better mimic the original photo. This piece is curved and probably going to be a bolo tie since I’m obsessed with them right now.
The final baked pieces of the scrap pieces. These are all baked on the Hollow Bead Maker so that they have random curves in them. That top heart is a scrap piece of the leftover sheet I cut the ovals out of.
And here is the rest of the scrap piece that I gently folded (and prayed that it would look “artistic”). There was one of the oval pieces on it already, so I added a couple more. This is now baked as well. This is large, maybe 4×3 inches, so I “might” frame it. I have no wall space, so I have to really think about that..
xoxo, syn
synssculpeyblog 