Polimeralia 2021 Special Online Edition 7 to 8 August 2021

Venice and its luxury have fascinated people with their majesty, their attractive colours and the gold of their Byzantine past.

Its gardens are small hidden treasures that are only sometimes revealed to the traveller who wanders through them.

For this piece, Venice and more specifically its colourful plaster, its hidden gardens and St. Marco’s Basilica are the source of inspiration.

What will you learn in this workshop?

To imitate Venetian plaster

Playing with colour, the properties of metallic clays and using very few tools, you are going to make a veneer that imitates Venetian stucco.

The most exciting thing about this process is that you will learn to control almost, almost 100% the result.

Modelling flowers

I’m sure you already know how to make flowers with volume and there are plenty of methods described on the internet. But I don’t think I’m wrong if I tell you that none of these flowers are inspired by the arches of St. Marco’s Basilica in Venice.

Besides, with this method you will learn to model them using only your hands, there will be no moulds involved in this part of the workshop.

To apply beautiful golden reflections.

If we are talking about Venice and St. Marco’s, the luxury of gold is a must.

You will not only choose whether you want to give a matt, satin or shiny finish to your garden, but you will also add that touch of luxurious decadence that gold brings and that harmonises so well with the concept of the piece.

To modify the consistency of the clay according to the work you are doing.

The consistency of the clay is something that is not paid much attention to, and it is a pity, because in many cases it makes the difference between a well-done work or a spectacular one.

In Venetian Garden you are going to begin to get into the world of clay consistency and how to modify it so that your work becomes perfect.

And a lot more…

You will be able to give your pieces different finishes.

You will carry out the work using the minimum number of firings and you will structure the whole process in such a way that there is no wasted time.

Moreover, you don’t have to worry if you have been working with clay for a short or long time, as it is a design in which the main element is repeated, you can choose both the number and the size of the elements you want to make.

If you have only recently started in the world of clay or during the class you like to work at a leisurely rhythm, then you will be able to choose a simpler model or one with fewer elements.

On the other hand, if you are more experienced or faster at working with polymer clay, then you can move on to more complex designs.

Whether you consider yourself to be in the first group or the second, you will go home with a lot of designs that I will show you and explain at length.

As has become a classic in my classes, we’ll talk about colour theory, design elements, composition, balance…

And, of course, we’ll have a great day together.

We associate village life with tranquillity as opposed to the hustle and bustle of the cities, which, like a greedy merchant, have grabbed most of the population with the siren song of modernity. But this hustle and bustle comes at a cost and it is not surprising to look back with nostalgia for the memories of times gone by. And in the villages, what memories will be treasured in the stones of those centuries-old houses, undaunted guardians of past lives, now crumbling with no one to guard them, with the inexorable passage of time that ends up turning the present into the past and the past into oblivion. This course Memories is a small tribute to the villages and their stones, a return to the origins where, at least in memory, everything seemed simpler.

In this course we will leave behind the precision of the most modern tools, we will forget the most contemporary designs and we will set aside the most cutting-edge techniques. We will recover basic tools, we will go back to working with our hands and to playing with different materials as naturally as we did when we were children.

We will make a functional decorative element whose components we will be able to adapt, varying only its scale and composition, to jewellery. We will learn ways of working with clay that we can then apply to other types of work that we usually do.

We will work on handmade clay textures with basic tools to reproduce the randomness that the wear and tear of time gives to materials. We will play with volumes to give depth to the elements, and we will accentuate that depth with the help of texturing and the use of colour.

We will optimise firings by trying to reduce them to the indispensable minimum, using other methods to harden certain elements and preserve the work done while working on other parts in the raw state.

On this occasion a large part of the colour work of our composition will be done with acrylic paints. We will introduce techniques of brush application, paint preservation, colour mixing, inking, lighting, weathering… And above all, we will return to that bubble in which we used to isolate ourselves as children while holding a brush, concentrating only on watching the paint flow.

We will make different independent elements where we will apply simple techniques to simplify the reproduction to scale, losing as little detail as possible.

In short, it will be a course in which we will enjoy working with clay, modelling with the tools and playing with the brushes.

In order to approach this project from different points of view, we will also have the collaboration of Alex Hernández, who will contribute his modelling and handling of brushes to this project to give it more facets than it would have had if it had come only from one author.