Taking Your (Sugar or Clay) PEONY Flower to the NEXT LEVEL: 10 TIPS

By Christina Wallis,

…all images here are by me and of my own flowers, in Cold Porcelain air dry clay, unless otherwise stated

1

PETALS: make sure that all your edges are thinned well ( using the plastic sleeve and cell pin technique if necessary, I have plenty of it going on in my YOUTUBE tuts ) YET make sure that the main body of your petal, about 2/3 – 3/4 of it, is left fleshy enough to handle the max definition of your veiner, hide the wire if need be, and generally, hold the weight of the petal. Good flower veiner, where you can see the thicker veins growing thinner through to the end, should guide you with this.

2

MAKE YOUR OWN STAMENS. Yes, it does take you longer. No, it doesn’t take all day, and it only gets quicker as you get hang of it. There are no buts about it, self-made stamens scream ‘bespoke’ and ’one off’ …I have quick demo on making basic DIY stamens in CP on both my instagram @christina_wallis_flowers and my facebook pages, I mention what to do, if you’re using sugar there, too.  

Basic stamens, the technique used for Cold Porcelain Air Dry Clay ( which is no less non-edible than stiffened cotton thread just saying)..

3

OWE YOUR FLOWERS !!! For all the troubles being an artist could sometimes entail (and which, of course, deserves its own 10s some other time), I am convinced that we are free to claim our own boundaries in the artistic space. In my observation over the years, following, breaking, and even not yet knowing the rules, when it comes to making flowers, could bring about the most breathtakingly beautiful and surprising results ( as well as some tragic on occasions, guilty as charged!) 

4

KEEP YOUR STAMENS NICE AND TALL. It would help you to take more of the nice pictures. While it’s much easier to find a gazillion of nice angles with real flowers, with handmade, you’d need to get creative. Tall stamens look very natural. Delicate and other-worldly, real stamens draw our very clever eyes to them, like bees’ so we remember them being ‘everywhere’. The longer stamens sort of act as a little pretty ‘petty coat’ to the handmade Peony. 

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5

 CUT YOURSELF SOME SLACK, allow enough time and enough tries to make your very special creation. Be prepared that sometimes loads of longwinded effort would come to nothing. Fear not, unbeknown to yourself, you would retain the skill gained, and it would step in to gift you unexpectedly sometime in the future. People won’t remember how many flowers you made, just which got them to double-take. This does not apply to commercial flowers as much as those you do like your life depended on it. 

6

Loose CHESS STYLE POSITIONING for your petals ( as opposed to overlapping, fan style ) is a good idea, in my experience. The ‘loose’ in it, sort of lets your layers ‘breathe’ and have more movement, as well as helps you to control the overall flower shape. ( By ‘loose’ I mean less petals per layer than you can squeeze in, leaving the chunky gaps between the attached petals of the given layer and placing the next layer’s petals over the gaps in the previous layer ).

7

LESS IS MORE. Don’t be tempted to use up all the petals you’d made including even the testers, just because you spent more of your good time making them than you ever expected to. It’s important to study other types of Peonies next to the one you chose to make, and see how petal-full they are in comparison.

The more petals you have, the harder it is to keep the shape, more so with sugar than Cold Porcelain Clay, and you will do yourself a favour to work in proportion based on the above, rather than thinking ‘well the real peony has plenty of petals, so I’m just being extra authentic here’…Nope (have you ever counted just how many petals there are in a Peony? But so what). You are not working with real petals and need to avoid overcrowding of the inflexible wire housing petal bottoms, among other things. 

8

… PETAL MOVEMENT is your playing field for jumping the orderly cue on the way to that mysterious ‘next level’. It seems to me, that the petal moment is the most overlooked element in the flower making currently, and so it pays to pay attention to it! Unfortunately, it is not something anyone can easily explain and yet it’s there ( or not! ) in every work that we see. In my opinion, mastering the petal moment has more to do with being mindful of this aspect when in process, than the artist’s experience with flower making.

If anything, experience may stop you from seeing the novel side of the given flower if you are not careful. I think it helps, for example, to look with the intention at the endless number of different blooms belonging to the same type of flower, to see just how differently their petals behave, and to remind yourself to stay switched on, when you are shaping your petals with the internal composition of your flower in mind. With that thought… be kind to yourself, do expect misses as well as hits. 

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9

VEINERS. You can make a totally beautiful few flowers with one and only veiner, so don’t stall yourself if that’s all you have, where’s a will there’s a way. That said, having tried the minimalist way about it ( my frugal ways with flower making are aired in my earlier YOUTUBE videos ), I would say that having a number of carefully chosen good veiner / mold tools, is a very good idea.

I feel that my own work has improved visibly with a better choice of flower and leaf veiners, after I started my own veiner SHOP. Chose well, purchase what’s necessary only when you done / can’t substitute with what you already have.

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10

LAST BUT NOT LEAST. Don’t go forgetting, that you are chasing your own ‘next level’, not somebody else’s ( that goes for dreams, too, but anyway…) or you’ll kill yourself ( or your spirit, or your desire to create)… sorry to throw this old cliche in the mix, but there it is. Every artist, likely every human being, is in possession of their own badly wanted, ‘next level’. If you prefer somebody else’s flowers to yours in this moment in time, find comfort in the fact, that when it comes to that ephemeral next level, we are all in the same boat.

BONUS TIP!!! …for those of you, who’d lasted to the end, now the Q I get all the time…the SHINY PEONY LEAVES How to: For Cold Porcelain Air Dry Clay use Mr Clear Semi-gloss spray ( non-edible ), I love it, and for Gumpaste, I hear, it’s PME’s Spray Glaze or Leaf Glaze ( diluted confectioners glaze) Nicholas Lodge has one that looks cute.

If you want to see if it’s worth the bother (or if your end goal is Instagram photos ) rub the surface of your leaf/tester leaf with some vaseline, for a short while it looks just like the real McCoy!

THANK YOU for reading, if you want to add some useful tips or feel you strongly disagree with anything I wrote here, please leave a comment, either way it would be useful and every small blogger loves comments of course! I

HAVE FUN MAKING NEW FLOWERS , check in next Sunday etc , in case I’m in the mood for a new blog , if you enjoyed this one! + I already have a blog introducing Cold Porcelain check it out