The Beach & Sky!

   So far, we've created our bangle form out of scrap clay (doesn't that always feel good) and made some wonderful waves for our polymer painting using our Water Cane! Well, when you're painting a tropical paradise, you also need a beach and a wonderful tropical sky.  These are the easiest two steps in creating my polymer bangle, but are absolutely lovely when all put together. So here it goes!

Sand Cane

  This is extremely easy to make!  All you need is an extruder and a variety of colored clay!  I used white, brown, tan, beige, and ecru in my mix. 1) Condition each color clay and run them through your extruder using your finest spaghetti disk with multiple small holes.  You only need a couple of inches of each color - depending on how large of a cane you want to make.  I made about twice as much of the medium hued colors than white or brown.  And feel free to mix colors to add more variety to your sand.  2) Mix up the different colors and shape them into a rectangle and then 3) reduce and re-stack the rectangle until you get your sand as fine as you want.  Now, just slice and create your beaches!!  It's pretty much as easy as that!  Now if you want, this would be fun in yellower shades or more rosy shades or even in greens for grass!

Tropical Sky Plug

   This is also a wonderfully simple multi-colored skinner plug that truly is the finishing touch to our tropical paradise back-drop.  It's made up of 4 different colors - blue, turquoise, white, and fuchsia.  You'll see a simple layout of it at the photo at the right.  1) For mine - I started with a 3 1/2" square of turquoise. 2) I cut out a 2" triangle to the top corner on the right for my dark blue (so a 2x3.5" right triangle of dark blue) and placed it against the turquoise like shown.   3) I cut out a 1 1/2" triangle from the turquoise on the left side to the left top corner for my white triangle (so a 1.5x3.5" right triangle of white) and then placed  it against the removed section of turquoise on the left side as shown.  And finally 4) I cut and removed a 1/2" triangle of white from the left side to the top corner and replaced it with a fuchsia triangle (a 1/2x3.5" right triangle of fuchsia).  5) Use your fingers to make sure the clay is securely blunted up against each other and run through the pasta machine starting with the bottom edge of the blend pictured in the photo.  Fold in half and continuing running through your pasta machine like a normal skinner blend until you get a smooth transition between the colors.  6) Now make a plug! Take your finished blend and fold into 3rds matching up the colors and run through the pasta machine on your largest setting and then on a smaller setting to get a long thin blended sheet that goes from pink on one end and blue on the other.  Fold it up accordion style in 1" sections to get the plug shown in the lower picture.  Here is a great tutorial for making a skinner plug: http://www.tooaquarius.com/tutorials/skinner-blend-plugs/ if you need to see it.  =)  Elaine shows to fold it in half, but with this small of a plug, I use 3rds.  Now just add your sky slices to your water and beach, cutting out sections for the taller hills.

And there you have it - a perfectly painted polymer background for our tropical paradise!!!