Ilysa: Hi, I'm Ilysa.
Kira: And I'm Kira.
Ilysa Welcome to Polymer Clay TV.
Kira: Today, we’re going to talk about using composition gold and silver leaf. It's sold in very thin sheets.
Ilysa: Let's get started. Here are some of the supplies that we are going to need to get started for this project. You’re going to need something to roll your clay out. This is one of our rods, you’re going to need some composition leaf, we have some silver and some gold, and it comes in thin sheets. You’re going to need a sharp blade, a poker and you’re going to need a solid color clay as well as some translucent with two piece sizes of two different colors.
What I'm going to start off by showing you is this solid black color and I'm going to add some gold. So actually, I'm going to add some silver leaf on it. So let me just move everything out of the way and we’ll get started.
Here’s the silver leaf. I'm just going to lay this directly on to the clay and it doesn’t have to be neat or anything like that, you just lay it on because the effect that we’re going to do is going to crack all of this anyway.
Kira: And the clay is sticky and tacky so the leaf is going to stick right on to it. You just need to press it down.
Ilysa: Exactly. And try to eliminate any air pockets. Although, when I run this through the pasta machine, that will get rid some of the air pockets. You just want to do something like that. And we’re going to take a break right this second and we’re going to hook-up our pasta machine so we can show you what we do with this.
Now, here is the silver leaf that I’ve applied to my black clay. What I'm going to do is I'm going to run it through the largest setting of my pasta machine and that’s going to start to crackle the clay. All right, just run it through. In here, it's crackled a little, but I want a little more crackle than that, so I'm going to go to the next setting down on the pasta machine and I’m going to run it through again. In here, it's crackled a little more, but I'm still not happy with it. I'm going to go a little more. I want it to crackle a lot.
So I'm just changing the setting on my pasta machine and rolling it through, and there you have it. You’ve got a nice crackle and then I can apply it. Well, we’re going to be showing how to make pens with this in our next episode of Polymer Clay Classroom, so you may want to check that out.
There are so many things you can with it and this is one of the pens that Kira has made and she used, I believe it was pearl.
Kira: A pearl clay, and the same exact technique that Ilysa just showed with a silver leaf.
Ilysa: Right, and actually, here is a pen that I’ve used the gold leaf on and I’ve actually impressed one of our texture plates into it first. So you can do a lot of different things with it. This is a pen I made where I’ve used a blue clay and then I’ve actually added ink on over the pen. So, just play around with it. This is actually a stand to the pen that I’ve made. So we’re going to show you how to make a stand as well. These make really great gifts especially for teachers and someone who works in an office. And Kira is going to show you another technique that you can do as well.
Kira: Yup, and one of my favorite ways of using the leaf with a clay is to actually incase it inside the clay and here on the bottom of this pen, you can see pretty well that this leaf is not on the outside. It's actually within the layers and the best way I found to do that is with the translucent clay. But you’ll see this clay has colors to it, so I'm going to show you how to get a little bit of color into your translucent clay.
I just used a very small little pea sized, a bit of whatever color I'm going to use and you’ll be surprised the color goes pretty far and it's going to take a few minutes. We might pause and show you some things while I'm doing this. It’s going to take quite a few minutes to get this amount of clay into the translucent, but I'm just going to start rolling it through my pasta machine over and over until it's blended.
Okay, so here, I have some turquoise and some fuchsia blended into my translucent clay, and I'm going to do a quick skinner blend. We’ve had a lot of notes from our audience asking how do I do this basic technique and I decided that because I made that pen with a skinner blend, maybe today would be a good idea to show you.
So basically, you take two rectangles of clay of the same size and cut them into a triangle and then you’re going to reassemble them back into a rectangle like this and smudge them together in the middle just so that they stick. Okay, and now, this is going to get rolled through the pasta machine, always in the same direction many, many times until this side is more turquoise and this side is more pink and you’ll see how that works.
Now, I know that one of the questions I often get is how do you keep your skinner blend from smudging outward and what will happen. So what I like to do is stick it up against one side of my pasta machine, that keeps that side straight, and then turn it around and stick the other up against it. This is just holding in the sides because it likes to spread out this way. There’s a little piece of clay in there. So you’ll see, as it comes out of the pasta machine, I'm just folding it in half, I'm always keeping the pink side on the pink side and the turquoise side on the turquoise side, and sticking it back through.
Ilysa: Right, and she’s putting it to fold into the pasta machine and that’s to help get any air pockets out.
Kira: You can see we’re starting to get some blending of the colors. Now, I know in books, it sometimes says you should run it through 30 times or 25 times or something, but I run it through until it's blended. So this clay that I started with was a really soft translucent, it was pretty conditioned out of the package, so it's blending up really quickly. I think it's only been through maybe 10 or 12 times and it's almost done, but if it had started out harder, I probably would’ve taken longer.
So now, I'm feeling almost satisfied with this blend I would want to do it maybe five more times, but I'm going to start the technique I wanted to show you by putting the gold leaf into it right now. So I'm just going to take a sheet and the way I like to get my leaf into the clay is by actually sticking my clay onto the leaf and then ripping off the edges like this.
Ilysa: Save your edges too because you’ll find you’ll want to use these little pieces in different projects, so make sure to save them.
Kira: Yeah, and because it comes all stuck together in that sort of booklet, it's pretty easy to hold on to the scraps. So I'm just going to shut the book back on the rest of that piece and set that off to the side. And now, my gold is on to that blend, I'm going to just run it through to make sure it's stuck, and it starts to crackle a little bit and I like that and I want it. And I’m going to continue this, I’m running it through the machine the same direction as my skinner blend because I don’t want to ruin that. So you’ll see here, the thicker the clay when you put it through the pasta machine, the bigger the crackle. So if you’ve got a double layer for example, this crackle is going to be really big.
So now, each time I run it through here, a layer of gold is going to get stuck inside my clay and because it's translucent, you’re going to be able to see it. See right here, if you’ll look closely, you can see gold inside the clay.
Ilysa: I think it looks neat on the outside too.
Kira: Yeah, and almost sometimes it ends up looking like an animal pattern like a tiger or leopard or something, so it's kind of neat.
Ilysa: Right.
Kira: So depending on how much you want left on the outside or if you want it all smudged on the inside, you could stop now and continue. So now, you can use this piece of clay to make a pendant or cover an object and that’s just another way to use leaf with your clay.
Ilysa: Why don’t you show them that mask you made too?
Kira: Oh, yeah, in a later episode around Halloween time, we’re going to be showing how to make masks. So, on this mask on the faceplate here, I have gold leaf on black clay and then on this swirled edge here, I just kind of used my finger to stick a little dabs of leaf onto the clay wherever it would stick.
Ilysa: Right, and if you check out our Polymer Clay Classroom downloads, we’re going to be showing how to make pens and stands with the leaf, and we’re going to show a variety of different techniques that you can make. And these pens that we use are big round sticks and they are all refillable, so that’s a nice thing about it as well. This pen here, I’ve added some ink so you’ll get a different effect with whatever you add to it. So, just play around with them and have fun.
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