More Contrast In Your Polymer Clay Skinner Blends

Video #722: Some easy color management tips that will help you to create better polymer cane designs, with more definition... More Info: http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?... Polymer Clay Tutor. In today's video I will show you how to add more contrast to your polymer clay Skinner blends or Teardrop Blends. If you are not familiar with Skinner Blends, it's when you take more than one color of polymer clay and use a blending technique to create a gradient sheet of clay that blends from one color into the next, in an Ombre effect. There are lots of cool things you can do with a Skinner / Teardrop Blend. In fact, in this video I had planned to show you a polymer clay cane using a Skinner Blend, called a Zipper Cane. But when I went to make some samples, it occurred to me that you may not know how to make sure that the colors you chose for this cane had enough contrast in them, to make a cane the works. So I decided to show you the blends this time, and I will show you how to make the cane in the next video. I show some examples of Zipper canes. When you look at all the samples, the canes that have the most contrast in their colors, are the ones that show the zipper pattern best. The colors that are too close in value (i.e. the colors that are not that darker or lighter than than the other), will not have enough contrast to show off the zipper effect. Patterns get "visually" lost, because they blend with your eyes. This is especially accentuated when the cane is reduced. The easiest way to get great contrast, is to blend a dark color with White... like I did with the Ultramarine Blue and White. Most instructors do this with their Skinner Blend instructions... which is good. But... there are other options you may want to pursue as well. For example, what if you wanted to combine a couple of colors that did not have a lot of contrast between them? What you can do is amp up your blends by either adding a darker shade at one end, or a lighter shade at the other... or maybe even do both! In the video I do a Teardrop Blend using Periwinkle (Premo) and Wisteria (Premo), which are both of the same color value. So the blend ends up with not enough contrast. To fix this, I add White to the Wisteria side of the blend. This is way too hard to explain in writing... but it will make sense when you watch the video... :) Related Video: Teardrop Blend Color Gradients Made Easy... http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?... Related Video: Easy Skinner Blends No Pasta Machine... http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?... Related Video: How To Make Long Skinner/Teardrop Blend Strips... http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?... Related Video: Is Your Skinner Blend Getting Too Wide... http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?... Related Video: Teardrop Blend Shift - Color Way Variations... http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?... And... more info about today's video is at my blog... http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?... Cindy Lietz & Doug Lietz Social Links:    / polymerclaytutor     / polymerclay     / pctutor     / polymerclaytips   Polymer Clay Tutor... "Make what you love... Love what you make."