Stitch Craft CREATE magazine feature...

WOW! This year sure did fly by quickly. We never had a chance to tell you about our Creative Business profile we did for this wonderful inspirational magazine; stitch | craft | create; that was on newsstands this Christmas. I believe you can still order a back issue online here.

Working with Shannon the editor and Jennifer who interview us for the story couldn't have been an easier process. We were able to supply all our own photos and we think the piece came out very nice. 

Shannon told us she was thrilled to profile polymer clay artist since they haven't had clay artist in the magazine before. 

Here is a our two two page spread profile:

 

How cute is the fun graphic of our name for the headline of the story.

If you haven't seen this magazine before, be sure to check out an issue next time you are at a book store.  This seasonal magazine is a fun, whimsical, beautifully designed inspirational read.

Why yellow and silver for Christmas?

We say: why not. What is so great about about being an artist and designer is that YOU have all the creative control and the final say on what subject matters to create and the colors you envision for your designs.

So when we decided to design this mini woodland winter ornament set this season, we choose to go in the not your typical Christmas palette of reds or greens, but instead to try a bold yellow, glittery white and shiny silver. We think the end result is smashing!

The collection did sell out and we are sure everyone who received them this holiday smiled with glee  when admiring these cuties.
  

Fun Fireworks

Happy Fourth everyone!Hope it was a fun one. We thought we would share some of these fun shots we took of the fireworks over the 4th with the kids. They are not great shots..for some reason I couldn't get good shots this year. Honestly, I was trying to keep my terrified 2-year old from running off, she wasn't crazy about the fireworks. But the funny light effects are kinda cool.

We know we have been a little lazy with the blog lately, but we are hoping to get back in the swing of things very soon. We are now sketching away for our new Halloween/Autumn collection and we will share more on the fun ideas we come up with you soon. In the mean time you can checkout our last years collection of posts we did in July 2010 about creating a collection in 31 days.

Have a nice weekend!

Who...Who... Who is Swirly Designs?

Since there might be a few of you who are visiting our site for the first time during this Halloween blog party event, we thought we would mention who we are and show a little of what we do.

We are a husband and wife team, from Reading, MA, and met while at The New England School of Art & Design in Boston. I entered the Graphic Design field while Paul pursued a career in Illustration. We married in 2000 and soon thereafter began a joint venture designing ornaments using polymer clay. Our designs are all original hand-sculpted, hand-painted polymer clay ornaments that interpret traditional images through a playful, contemporary eye, producing one-of-a-kind ornaments. We recently posted a behind-the-scenes series that takes you into producing our 2010 Halloween collection.


Our working title was Creating a Collection in 31 Days.
Well, after reading, you can see that it took a lot longer than that! Here are the links... enjoy and let us know what you think.

Creating a collection in 31 days!
Halloween in July: Promoting and Marketing
Halloween in July: Still sketching....
Halloween in July: Working in clay
Halloween in August: Wrapping up working in clay
Halloween in August: Painting
Halloween in August: All that Glitters
Halloween in September: Photo shoot wrap up
Our New Halloween Collection is online

Halloween in September: Photo shoot wrap up

We are chuckling a bit at ourselves. We find it funny that we are wrapping up our final Halloween in July challenge series post...IN SEPTEMBER! LOL!

We thought that if we challenged ourselves in creating a whole collection in 31 days and blogging about it, that it would force us to stay on schedule. Well we were a little off..what's an extra month or two! But the good thing is that we will have the collection ready in time for Halloween (the collection launches Mon Sept 13th)

Now we are really behind on our Christmas collection YIKES!!! We better get going!!


Photographing a collection is tricky for us to say the least. We are not by any means professional photographers so we aren't going to blog about any tricks or tips on shooting the perfect photo.
Since photographing the collection is always the last minute step we never have time to invest in planning really cool images and set ups. We seem to just take a bunch of shots until we get something that works.

We always question the best type of lighting...should we use natural or indoor lighting? We want to have images that have to have the least amount of color correction afterwards. Another tough decision for us is choosing a backgrounds color that will make the ornaments pop instead of always using white.

We're not gonna lie it's not easy or fun!


We try to create shots that will show off the ornaments in the best possible way. Experimenting with interesting papers and props. We liked the orange color of the sketchbook cover so we tried some shots on there.


We also tried using candy corn in the background for some of the pictures. But they became a little busy so we ate the candy instead. Yum!

We hope for anyone who sees our ornament photos will get a good idea of the designs and feel comfortable that they know what to expect when their ornament arrives in the mail.

For this collection of 17 designs we must have taken over 300 shots with many backgrounds to come up with 17 usable photos. Well post some of the outakes shots on Monday.

So hopefully this little series of posts about putting a collection together was helpful and inspiring to all of you reading this. And to show you the many hats Lianne and myself put on to create a collection for each Holiday.

Thanks again for your support! Come back on Monday to see the new collection.
Lianne & Paul

Halloween in August: All that Glitters

What's an ornament without a little glitter to make it sparkle?

Thinking back to the early days of our ornaments and how they were all glitter free, we now can't imagine them without glitter. We think our designs aren't really finished without that glistening finish.


Of course using glitter is extremely messy. The studio gets covered... we are covered and anyone who comes to visit the studio will always leave with a gift. Lately we've noticed that the kids have that extra sparkle!

When it comes to glitter we must have tried every brand out there looking for the one that has the best sparkle (and believe us not every glitter sparkles the same). We prefer the ultrafine transparent glitter because it will cover the ornament without covering the paint colors. We will occasionally use the color glitter like black, for some of the new Halloween designs. The Martha Stewart Craft Glitters come in such visually appealing beautiful colors that we wish we could incorporate more into our ornaments.


And speaking of Martha... we love her glue pens for glittering our ornaments. (It was our #1 pick Martha craft tool that we blogged about in a past post).

We always take in consideration the placement of the glitter and make sure it makes sense. We think about where and how much glitter we'll use on a design and we don't want to drown the ornament in glitter just because we can. Sometimes too much IS too much!


These little pumpkins are drying after getting their dusting of glitter


Don't these eyes just sparkle.... with fear!


Here is a close up of a pumpkin with transparent glitter. It looks like an orange glitter but it's not.


After all the glitter and embellishment work is done and dried and we are able to handle them, we'll thread each ornament with a sheer ribbon making sure the correct color choice works with each design. This task may sound simple but actually choosing the correct color ribbon can make an ornament pop or the choice could be very distracting. So having lots of color options is helpful for those tricky ornaments that the color choice is not obvious. The picture above shows ornaments that are all ready and waiting to be tied and frayed.


Up next will be our final post from this series.... photographing the collection
Our launch of our new Halloween/Fall 2010 collection is schedule for Monday September 13th. Make sure you have signed up for our mailing list so you'll get the email reminder letting you know the collection is online.

You guys have been very supportive of us over the years which makes us want to push our creative limits to make sure we deliver to you a spoooktacklur collection each and every year.

thanks!

Halloween in August: Painting

Our studio table has been cleared of all our clay tools so we can make room for our favorite part of the process ... the painting!

We choose to create the ornaments using the white clay because we really want to have total control of the colors we choose to paint the designs, for example...


For this design above, to create this striking green background we mixed anywhere from 3-4 different shades of green and yellows with a generous amount of water to give the design a watercolor effect. We very rarely use paint color straight from the tube. We even will mix a little purple in to the black to give it a little more something rather then straight black. The tricky part of doing it like this is trying to re-create the colors if they dry up or if we need to create more ornaments.






A few years ago we created this chart to keep track of our acrylic paints because every time we would go to the craft store to pick up or check out the paints we could never seem to remember which colors we had. The manufacturers are always adding new names and colors to their lines we could never keep up with all the new colors. Our sign might be a little large and we do get a few odd looks but hey it's better then having 10 bottles of Prairie Green #2310.


We are very happy with how our fall ornaments came as well. This ornament has a full palette of autumn colors.


This spooky little ghost peaking out the window was painted using a glow-in-the-dark paint.
It's a fun element added to our Halloween collection.


Here is our new mini swirly scarecrow wind catcher drying on top of a paint tube.


And what is fall without lots of mini pumpkin wind catchers.




Another paint technique we are experimenting is this one-step crackle effect. You paint this crackle paint over your painted ornament and it cracks giving it an aged look. You brush a lighter color over the crackles and wipe away the excess paint and it will make the cracks more pronounced.




pretty creepy!


Perfect for the Halloween season don't you agree.

~ Up next we'll share the final steps to make this collection complete!

Halloween in August: Wrapping up working in clay

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend.

We have been very busy around here and are working around the clock to wrap up the new Halloween collection in clay. We thought we would go over a few more items before we get into sharing the painting process with you.

Last week we completed the clay sculpting and all the ornaments have been swirled and baked and each one needs a light sanding and then we wipe off all the dust. Sanding is a very tedious but important step. It allows the paint to adhere to the ornaments better.

We feel we have created a nice collection of ornaments to celebrate the Halloween & Autumn season. We can't wait to show you all. Above is one of our fall designs which shows a tree in the field dropping its colored leaves.


Here is another shot of the swirls being added


Here is the original thumbnail sketch for this designs that we changed a bit after sculpting it in clay. We removed the bird from the tree and added a house in the background. Even though we have pretty tight sketches and ideas in the beginning, we never know where the design will take us once we start sculpting.


We use 12 x 12 cermic tiles (which you can get at a hardware store) to work on because these tiles can go right into the oven to bake and it saves us from handling the ornaments to much so we don't distort the designs.

We picked the shelving unit at Michaels to help us with the many tiles we have around the studio waiting to be swirls and baked. We'll have as many as 12 or so tiles around the studio during a collection and trying to find a safe spot is tricky and this unit seems to be helping out some, by giving a place to store them.


Always trying to stay organized and keep things together we got these boxes (above) to keep all our paper templates and eraser stamps (below) in one place. So if we need to create more of a design we will know where to find them.


Happy sculpting!

Stay tuned for our next post where we will begin working in paint.