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 Conference Presenter – Christiane DeHaesI am Chris De Haes, born and living in Belgium. Age : don’t talk about that , I still feel I’m 25 but that’s a long time ago.I had a career of 27 years as a social worker and manager of a home for seniors. After that I worked as a security agent at Brussels Airport. In the nineties I started making jewelry with Swarovski beads, wrote a pattern book about it, but when I discovered Art Clay I found my niche and became full time Art Clay adept. I became a level I and level II instructor in 2006 and started teaching Art Clay. Since 2007 Art Clay Benelux allowed me to teach level I and II. Because I didn’t want to copy other peoples work, I tried from the beginning to create my own style. I took follow up courses by professional jewelers and tried to find unknown possibilities of Art Clay Silver, in combination with other materials. Thinking about adding colors to silver and the firing of Art Clay brought me to ceramics. I met a French lady, named Laurence Destrada, who creates beautiful raku jewelry and that was the start of testing and trying to combine Art Clay and raku fired ceramic. At this moment I am working on a book about raku and Art Clay.  Conference Presentation Overview:Polymer Clay & Metal Clay There are many ways to add color on metal clay, but because I’m a big fan of clay, I tried the polymer clay. I thought it should be possible to do something more than just glue a piece of silver on a beautiful made polymer clay piece. There are a lot of great polymer clay artists, around the globe who make extremely beautiful art works but my goal was to learn a few special techniques and use these techniques in my metal clay work. I invited the Canadian artist Dan Cormier for a 6 day workshop (www.dancormier.ca) and took classes with Christine Dumont (www.allovercreation.net). In this presentation I will show the combination of their techniques with metal clay. With a power point presentation I give different ways of adding the polymer clay to the silver or vice versa. On these pictures you see my interpretation of the ‘Humbug’ of Christine Dumont once in metal clay with an insert of polymer clay and a ‘Humbug’ in polymer clay with an insert of silver.  Pre-Conference Class Overview:Making an Exotic Polymer and Metal Clay Ring In this class we will make a ring with a lot of different techniques, developed by teachers of different continents and adapted to my personal style. The metal clay for the ring shank and the reversed top lentil are textured with the ’sand technique’, developed by the Japanese master Taku Hirai. The sand technique texture is a new way to make your own personal textures. In class you get a full explanation of the basic technique and then you will make your own texture, using real old Belgian lace. Jewelry with other possibilities of the sand technique will be showed in class. During the firing process of the ring, I’ll give demonstration of the ’cutting edge’ technique, developed by the Canadian polymer clay artist Dan Cormier. By mixing different clays, cutting and rearranging the clay he obtains beautiful lines and shines in the clay. You will make your own cutting edge slab in polymer clay. Different colors of clay will be provided in class. After firing and finishing the ring, the polymer clay is added to the ring, baked and sanded. Click here for more information on this pre-conference class! |
back at past conferences: 2009 MCWC 2007 MCWC |
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2011 IPCA
Biennial Retreat
July 11-16, 2011
Concurrent with
the 2011 MCWC!