Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Polymer clay color recipes

  One of the problems that can happen with polymer clay, well, actually about any hobby is the need to keep track of your own custom colors. With polymer clay the following problems can arise.

  1. What color is the baked clay? (sometimes it is very different from the unbaked clay.)
  2. What colors were used to make a new color?
  3. What were the proportions used?
  4. What does the mix look like?
  5. What does the baked mix look like?
  6. What are the differences in the brands of clay? 
  7. How do the different clays respond to being mixed?


For a long time I have kept pages of colors that were mixed for tutorials.  It's really easy. 

Start with a sheet of three hole pages for a notebook, print out the numbers and begin.

These pages show how the colors turned out, their names and the recipes.

I began with pages that only had--

"Color 1", "Color 2" etc (They were all in numerical order). 

When the new color was mixed it was given a descriptive name and the recipe was written down on the page after the number. A chip was created, baked and glued to the page.

When all of the numbers were filled in, the original numbers and recipes were typed and printed on cardstock. (The reason for this is that my penmanship was hard to read!) The chips were removed from the original and glued to the now, readable finished page.
 

The recipe pages grew and as they did I got better about keeping the chips with the recipes.


As you can tell, I like some gently muted colors and lots of shimmery ones. 

These colors were made of what ever brand had the colors I needed to make a custom mix. Some are very beautiful but can never be perfectly re-made as the different brands were not listed. But, the recipes are a start.

Now I try to stay all in one brand of clay. I've chosen Pardo.




By Penni Jo

creator and sculptor of 

Best Flexible Molds









3 comments:

Sleepy Turtle Beads said...

This is fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing.

Unknown said...

Thank you so much, Penny Jo, I have been wanting to do this for years. You've given me incentive! XOXO love it so much.

Unknown said...

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