Metal Clay & Color

I am very happy to share with all of you that I am part of a wonderful new book coming up this summer. I was invited to be part of a group of artists who will share projects made with metal clay and different mediums to add color. The book's name is Metal Clay & Color by Kalmbach Books and complied by Mary Wohlgemuth. 

20 leading artists (Janet Alexander, Lorena Angulo, Lorrene Baum-Davis, Maggie Bergman, Pat Bolgar, Susan Breen Silvy, Barbara Briggs, Sandra Butchko, Catherine Davies Paetz, Pam East, Joy Funnell, Vickie Hallmark, Hadar Jacobson, Patricia Kimle, Irina Miech, Kim Otterbein, Cindy Pankopf, Cindy Silas, Jewelyn Vanoni and Michela Verani ) contributed ideas and projects for adding color to metal clay.

I created two projects for the book with bronzclay and added color using Creative paperclay and Gilders Paste, I will also have some images of my work for the gallery.

I am sure you will be inspired by the 25 projects included in the book.

Finally my "Reina" came alive!!

I had an idea about making a mask representing the beautiful "Coconut masks" from Mexico.

When I started the design process I did not have the right image about what I wanted to do.

The drawings in the clay came in the moment I saw the mask shape, I draw the face and she

came to life in my head.

I was so happy with the final image of my mask and send her to the kiln, by now I knew I had to use coconut charcoal and fired it at 1700 and hold for three hours.

Sadly for me, all my other pieces sintered but not my mask. I was very careful to take her out

of the charcoal but I lost two flowers in the process. I fixed the flowers in a different way and

decided to put her back again to the kiln.

She came out of the kiln without being sintered again!!!! This time she lost the eyebrows and I was not going to give up on her.

I decided to live her alone for a while and try again on a later time.

Yesterday I was going to do my third copprclay firing of the day when I saw her in my shelf, I knew this was the time for her to go back again in the kiln, if this time did not work I knew it will be over for her.


This time she sintered but she had some scars on the back, it is like all her struggles show up at the end but if you see her on the front, she still has her bright personality and I will wear her with a lot of pride!

More copprclay playing time!

I have been playing more with copprclay lately and I still have some problems with the firing to be the perfect one for my kind of pieces.

My work is bigger and thicker and sometimes I end up firing the pieces twice just to be sure they are sinter correctly.

I still have one mask that I have fired two times and the piece looks the same, the clay is dry but it is not sinter at all, I will keep on trying with this piece because I am very persistent and I love the face!

Although the face lost some flowers on the first firing and the eyebrows on the second firing, I will make it work!!! ;-}

On my first group of pieces I fired was a milagro heart I designed but it was not sinter and it broke. I kept the piece to see if I could fix it.

I had to make some changes to the piece and I like the way it looked at the end.

I had been thinking in making a cuff for a long time and one good friend artist Vickie Hallmark,

http://www.vickiehallmark.com/ ,showed me her amazing cuff and it really inspired me to try to make one.

The cuff fired perfectly but I had the bad idea to try to close it a little more and although I know that I needed to anneal the cuff before , I did it without doing it and I broke my cuff.

This mistake gave me the idea of making earrings with the same design, my friends in Facebook told me they like them as earrings too.

I end up making a new cuff, this time bigger and wider and the piece fired very good and I did not touch it after that ;-}.

Better to be safe than sorry again!