A Hot Method for Creating Custom Textures!

A great way to set your work apart from that of other metal clay artists is to create your own textures. One of the lesser known ways to do this is with a hot glue gun. You can drizzle strands of hot glue over coated paper, coated card stock, vinyl wallpaper, or cured sheets of polymer clay to create your own dimensional designs that can be impressed into metal clay or polymer clay. It's fun to drizzle freeform designs, but you also can draw or print out a design and then trace over it with the hot glue, or mark an evenly spaced grid as a guide for applying a symmetrical pattern of lines, dots, swirls, squares, or other motifs.

An interesting variation is to create a hot glue-patterned texture roller, which will allow you to impress a seamless, continuous texture on even very large slabs of metal clay or polymer clay. Start with a length of PVC pipe as long as the desired width of your texture plus 4", since you will leave the last 2" on either end of the pipe without texture to make it easier to roll the texture across the clay in a smooth motion with even pressure. So, for example, an 8" length of PVC pipe will provide a 4" section in the center for the texture.

Don't forget to use a clay release agent with your hot glue texture sheets or texture rollers.

For more detailed information about making hot glue texture sheets and texture rollers, see the Make your own one-of-a-kind textures to use with metal clay! section of my Squidoo lens on creating Textures in Metal Clay. This hot glue method for making custom texture sheets or texture rollers is just one of literally dozens of metal clay texturing techniques you'll find in that lens.

If you make (or have made) a hot glue texture sheet or roller, please share a photo of it. I'd love to see what you do with this technique!

Thanks and happy claying,

Margaret

© 2012 Squidoo Metal Clay Lenses by MSchindel. All rights reserved.

My Metal Clay Squidoo Lenses - Subscribe and Stay Up-to-Date!

Welcome to my new blog about my metal clay lenses on Squidoo!

Many metal clay artists, teachers and newbies from around the world use and recommend my Squidoo metal clay lens series (which includes 17 metal clay lenses as of this writing!). I usually post on Facebook when I add a new lens to my metal clay articles series on Squidoo, and sometimes when I make major changes to a lens, but I don't usually post on FB if I've just added, say, one or two new texturing techniques to my lens on Metal Clay Textures, or if I edit a firing schedule on my BRONZclay bronze clay lens.

Squidoo used to let visitors become fans of lenses so they could be notified via a "Squidcast" whenever something noteworthy was added or changed to the lenses they subscribed to, but that feature was discontinued. So I decided to create my own blog about my Squidoo metal clay lenses so that anyone who wants to has an easy way to stay up-to-date when I add a new metal clay lens or make a noteworthy update to one of my existing lenses.

To keep this blog interesting and worth subscribing to, I'll also post highlights of noteworthy tips, tricks and techniques from my Squidoo metal clay lenses (and occasionally some that I haven't written a lens about yet).

You can subscribe to this blog via your favorite RSS reader or via e-mail, whichever you prefer. I hope you do, and I'd appreciate it very much if you would help me spread the word via Facebook, Twitter, etc. (I've added social sharing buttons to make it quick and convenient to do this.)

Please let me know what you think, if there are specific topics you'd like me to cover in future posts, or just leave a comment to say hi! :)

Thanks and happy claying,

Margaret

View all my Squidoo lenses (not just those about metal clay!)

© 2012 Squidoo Metal Clay Lenses by MSchindel. All rights reserved.