How to Work with Polymer Clay and Pigment Ink

Ilysa: Hi, I'm Ilysa Bierer Kira: And I'm Kira Slye. Ilysa: And you’re watching Episode 4 of Polymer Clay TV. Today, we’re going to show you how to work with ink. And we’re going to show you how to stamp into the clay and then add ink as a finishing touch. And then Kira is going to show you how to add the ink to the clay to change the color of the clay and get your own unique colors. First, I'm going to start with a knitted piece of clay and I'm going to roll it between my hands to make a ball. And then I'm going to flatten it on my work surface and use my rod to do that, and then I'm going to add a little bit of water and I say a little because we don’t want it to be too wet when we add the ink. We want to wipe it off. And I’ll add a little water so it doesn’t stick. I’ll place it down onto my piece of clay and then use my rod to add the texture. And because these are clear, you can see through them and you can lift it up to see if it’s taking the impression, and this has. Let me pick that up and show you. This is the impression, and I want to wipe it off and get the water off that’s on there, with my—and now, I’d like to use my finger. And you can get a neat effect by adding several colors and I’ll just get a little of the ink on my finger and then gently roll it on top of the impressed image, and then I could come back. These are actually Tsukineko’s Dew Drop Brilliance and these ones are metallic and then I can add a little other color which is—this is a brown color and you’ll get a really neat effect, and it’s that easy. Kira, you want to show them the technique? Kira: Yes, I’m going to actually put some of this Pearlescent Sky Blue, also a Tsukineko Dew Drop Brilliance color into—this is a mix of pearl and silver equal amounts that I have premixed together to get a sort of light silver color. And I'm going to just put a bunch of this ink right into the clay and mix it up. That’s messy but it’s fun. And pigment inks are one type of ink you can use with Polymer Clay, and they actually have this clay—this ink has pieces of blue pigment in it, which will mix in to the silver and white clay that’s already blended and turn it a little bit more blue. This ink is different from dye ink. When you’re buying ink, you need to make sure that it’s pigment or dye. For this one, you’re using pigment ink and it’s actually the blue pigment that’s turning the clay the color, whereas if it was a dye ink, it would actually be sipping into the clay and dying it. We’ll be showing that in the later episode. Ilysa: Right. Kira: So, I just need to mix in enough of this that the blue shows. It takes a couple of minutes, but—because the clay can take a lot of extra pigment. Ilysa: Right, and the clay is heat set ink—this actually—the clay is not heat setting. The ink is a heat set ink and since you have to fire Polymer Clay anyway, it just really works well. Kira: Yeah, they compliment each other, very interesting. Ilysa: Right. Kira: So you can see here, my clay is starting to turn more blue. Ilysa: So, if you had white and you only had white clay, and you want a blue, this would be a good technique to mix the clay with the ink. Kira: So here, I’ll show you a piece of how it started out and this is now turning into a nice more blue color. And now, I'm going to show you one of my other techniques that I like to use with the texture sheets or a rubber stamp, anything that can create or touch here on the clay. I sometimes use the ink as an actual release, which means I'm going to stamp it right onto my texture sheet. So it’ll be moist and it’ll act as a release agent, so that when I press my clay into it, the ink is going to go down into the cracks and it’s also going to create a nice easy release, this clay is going to peel right off that sheet. Ilysa: So if Kira presses hers into her texture, whereas I roll on my texture into my clay. Kira: Right. Ilysa: There’s two different techniques and they’re both fun to try. There you go. Kira: Now, when this is heated and cured, this is actually one of the only times you might catch me sending, maybe just the very top layer of this stamp to pull the ink off of it, so that the sky blue color shows through and that the ink would be in the cracks of this stamp. Ilysa: For a neat effect. And we hope you try this technique. It’s a lot of fun and you can do a lot of things with them. You can turn this into jewelry. You can make a variety of things with these techniques, so just have fun with it. We hope you join us next time on Polymer Clay TV. Thanks for joining us. Kira: Make sure you tune in next week to Polymer Clay podcast, when we will be talking about dye ink.