annieb123's Review of Polymer Clay for Beginners (Art Makers)

by Emily Chen

Start making beautiful crafts from polymer clay! Art Makers: Polymer Clay for Beginners is your step-by-step guide to making trinkets, animals, plants, and more using this fun, easy, and kiln-free craft.

Polymer Clay for Beginners introduces artists, art hobbyists, and polymer clay enthusiasts to the versatile, accessible polymer clay medium. Because polymer clay does not require the use of a kiln and needs only baking in the oven, it is an easy, approachable art form for even the most inexperienced artist to learn, as well as kids, families, teachers, and anyone else looking for a fun, boredom-busting hobby or craft.

Professional artist and owner of Cat Bear Express, Emily Chen, demonstrates how to make adorable animal figurines, flowers, cookies, cakes, beads, and more through easy step-by-step projects. Each project features colorful, styled photographs demonstrating how finished pieces can be used, displayed, and gifted. A comprehensive tools and materials section and detailed information on techniques, baking, and glazing guide artists in their quest to become polymer clay pros.

A modern approach to sculpture art, polymer clay is the perfect choice for beginners and crafting enthusiasts.

The Art Makers series is designed for beginning artists and arts-and-crafts enthusiasts who are interested in experiencing fun hands-on mediums, including embroidery and papier-mache.

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Art Makers: Polymer Clay for Beginners is a tutorial guide to working with polymer clay by Emily Chen, the sculptor behind CatBearExpress. Released 19th March 2019 by Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint, it's 128 pages and available in paperback format.

Everyone is familiar with polymer clay. It's available at crafts and big-box retailers, by mail order, and I've even seen it at some larger grocery stores. The disconnect comes when you get your little packages of plastic home and try to make something. Even with the best intentions, none of my creations bore the slightest resemblance to the pictures I had up in my head. I needed a step-by-step tutorial, and this is a really good one.

I'm definitely a process based learner, so this book was perfect for me. The photographs are crisp and clear, the steps are very well delineated, and the projects are super cute and appealing (see the cover). There are a wide variety of subject tutorials; florals, fantasy animals, food, pets, etc.

This would make an amazing activity guide for scouts, church or library kid groups, or classroom art guide. I'm a middle aged adult and I am absolutely going to use the tutorials here to make myself some charms for my embroidery scissors and needle minders. This is a wonderfully inspiring book which has my fingers itching to get started!

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

Polymer Clay for Beginners (Art Makers)

by Emily Chen

Reviewed by annieb123 on Mar 22, 2019

Reading updates