400 Polymer Clay Designs: A Collection of Dynamic & Colorful Contemporary Work

by Lark Books (Editor)

Unique creations by top artists such as Nan Roche, Cynthia Toops, Barbara McGuire, and Gwen Gibson make this the best showcase of polymer clay work ever assembled. With everything from jewelry and vessels to art dolls and sculptures displayed in superb color photos, the versatility and beauty of the medium is exquisitely evident. Mosaics, millefiori, canework, and molded, stamped, and embossed there’s a little bit of everthing to please the eye. Dayle Dorowshaw’s magical Egyptian Spell Book features carvings and image transfers that blend seamlessly with gold leaf, candles, branches, and silver. Luann Udell’s faux-ivory artifacts take their inspiration from the prehistoric art in France’s Lascaux Caves. It’s the largest—and finest—book of contemporary polymer art available anywhere.

Genres: Crafts

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2004

Reviews

[The Adaptable Educator · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first glance this is a book that does exactly what its title promises: it assembles—visually, insistently—four hundred discrete answers to a single set of questions about colour, form and surface. But read as a sculptural essay rather than merely a compendium, 400 Polymer Clay Designs offers a fuller argument about what a low-cost, thermoplastic medium can do when approached with the sensibility of a designer rather than simply a hobbyist. The result is less an instruction manual than a visual manifesto: polymer clay, the book suggests, is a medium of modern ornament, a place where colour theory, pattern play and intimate scale meet.
Close reading: form, colour, and material rhetoric
The organizing principle of the book is visual abundance. Each spread trades in immediate, tactile delights—saturated palettes, crisp geometry, and the peculiar vitality that polymer clay imparts to small-scale objects. Across the pages one sees repeated compositional strategies: stacked solids and inlaid motifs, millefiori-derived canes translated into jewelry, marbled fields that verge on miniature landscapes, and modular tessellations that read as three-dimensional fabrics. These recurrences function like leitmotifs in a symphony: individually charming, in aggregate persuasive.
What gives the work its intellectual heft is the way colour is treated not as garnish but as structural device. Blocks of vivid pigment are allowed to do the heavy lifting—defining edges, suggesting depth, inventing optical relationships. Many designs demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of contrast (value and chroma), and there is a frequent willingness to pair the high-gloss, intensely pigmented surfaces of polymer clay with matte or oxidized metals and organic textures; these juxtapositions stage a dialogue between the synthetic and the lived, the industrial and the handcrafted.
Curation and audience
Lark Press has chosen curation over comprehensive pedagogy. The book functions as a sourcebook: an atlas of forms to be borrowed, remixed, or translated into other media. That editorial choice is a virtue for readers interested in provocation and idea-generation—professional jewelry designers, surface pattern artists, and makers seeking fresh formal cues will find the pages rich territory. Conversely, novices seeking step-by-step instruction or exhaustive technical troubleshooting may find the book wanting: inspiration is abundant here; incremental technique is often implied rather than spelled out.
Material politics and craft context
Seen through a broader craft lens, 400 Polymer Clay Designs participates in a larger reassessment of materials traditionally relegated to the realm of "craft." Polymer clay—cheap, adaptable, and squarely synthetic—has often been dismissed in hierarchies that privilege "noble" materials. This collection stages a quiet reversal of those hierarchies by insisting that conceptual rigour and visual daring can render any material worthy of serious attention. The book thereby aligns polymer clay with recent tendencies in contemporary craft that valourize process, surface, and the democratic availability of materials.
Strengths and limitations
Strengths:
Visual richness: The sheer range of colour and pattern makes the book an efficient generator of ideas.
Inventive combinations: Frequent pairings of polymer clay with other materials point toward hybrid practices.
Curatorial clarity: The images are presented so that formal patterns emerge across pages—readable at a glance but rewarding on slow study.
Limitations:
Technical depth: Practitioners who want comprehensive tutorials, kiln alternatives, or troubleshooting will need to supplement this volume with technique-focused manuals.
Contextual notes: Short captions and occasional technique tags might have benefited readers seeking the lineage or authorship of particular designs—who made what, and why—though the decision to prioritize image over text is defensible in a book of this type.
Who should read it, and why
400 Polymer Clay Designs is a particular kind of craft book: less a how-to than a what-if. For designers, teachers, and makers who collect visual prompts—a mood-board in book form—this volume will be indispensable. It is best used not as a literal blueprint but as a provocation: take a single motif, a daring colour pairing, or an unexpected surface treatment and let it mutate into new work. Read through a scholarly lens, the book stages an argument about material value, the aesthetics of smallness, and the modernist pleasures of colour and repeat. It does not exhaust polymer clay as practice, but it does reanimate it, showing how a humble plastic can sustain sustained acts of imagination.

[Ligaya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun book to look at - even 15 years after publication it still holds up and doesn't feel dated. Lately, I've been reading a bunch about polymer clay and more on PMC and there seems to not have been as much innovation in the intervening years, just more acceptance of polymer clay as a viable artistic medium. This book shows a huge range of work, from somewhat amateurish (rare) to very skilled. Some work is clearly polymer clay while other pieces feign raku, glass, or wood, intentionally or not. This book will inspire and spark creativity.