A – Nanetta Banato
Nanetta creates one-of-a-kind artworks in her Augusta, Kansas studio. She works with beads, fiber, precious metal clay and paper. Her primary medium is polymer clay from which she makes dolls, sculptures, jewelry, night-lights, collage elements and art purses. Nanetta's first book, Creative Techniques for Polymer Clay Jewelry was released in June. Aside from art, Nanetta's second calling is teaching. She enjoys project writing as well as hands-on instruction. You can find her projects on Polyform.com. She volunteers as an "expert" in crafts for About.com and has an online store at Ruby Lane - www.nb7art.com - where you can see her unique and current work.
I began with "Alice". Her face was a sheet of Ecru Premo cut to the size of her face. It was baked and lightly sanded. Then her face was drawn in with Prismacolor pencils. It was baked again and coated with TLS. The remaining elements were rendered with canes and only detailed at the end with pencil outlines. The frame and background were impressed with a hand cut rubber stamp. The A words were then etched into the frame with a tiny tipped burnishing tool and finished with a wash of water based oil paint after baking. It was created in sections and baked at intervals. The final touch was a glass amethyst jewel, secured with a gold clay bezel. This work took over a week to create. I call the technique "painting with clay in relief".
