Sculpey Color Tints are a relatively new product in the Sculpey product line and I have not worked a lot with them up to now. When I get my hands on a new (to me) product I like to make some tests and experiment, so I know what I am dealing with. So, this is what I will do today and I am going to take you along and show you how I proceed.
Color Tints can be used with Sculpey polymer clays, Liquid Clays and with resin. I don’t have resin, so I will stick to polymer clay for this time. Since tints are especially great for translucent colors and, given the qualities of color mixing in general, light colors, I decided to do a color swatch series with Premo Translucent clay, White Translucent clay and with White clay.
I do not want to use huge amounts of clay for what I count as preparatory work. And also I like to have my color samples more on the smaller side, because they tend to pile up. What I want to find out is how I can make a good range of color variations, without having to use a lot of material.
I rolled out my three base colors of clay: translucent, translucent white and Premo white, all on the thickest setting of my pasta machine. Then I used a small square cutter and cut out my shapes/portions of clay. I like to use the same quantities for my sample pieces, so I can see what difference a larger or smaller quantity of the tints will make. That can only be done, when I have the same amount of clay to compare the pieces. The smallest quantity of the tints I still can work with is one drop. Anything less is quite impossible to do. So the natural way to add the tints would be adding one drop, two drops, three drops and so on. But that would make the clay very saturated, use up a lot of material (again: I don’t want to do that) and also make it hard to see the different saturations in my small test pieces. After pondering about this for a bit I found a good solution for my problem: I will use fractions of a drop as my addition to the clay!
How will that work? I have one piece, that will be my reference piece, that has one measure of clay and one drop of tints. That is my point zero, so to speak.
Then I duplicate that: a second piece with one measure of clay (my cut out square of my clay, rolled out at the thickest setting of my pasta machine) and one drop of tints. But this second square will be divided into fractions! Cutting one liquid drop into fractions is not something that is easily done. Therefore I will let the tints dry on the clay, and then mix the tint into the clay. Now I have two identical pieces, one of which I will portion into the fractions and mix it with the remaining 4 pieces of clay without the tints mixed in.
I also want to have some color variations. I will do the exact same procedure with red, yellow and blue, and then also with a combination of one drop of red + one drop of yellow, one drop of yellow + one drop of blue and finally one drop of blue + one drop of read.
I have one piece as my base (one square of clay with one drop of tint or two drops in the case of the mixed colors) and one piece as my base for the fraction mixes. I have six color variations: red, yellow, blue, red + yellow, yellow + blue and red + blue and three kinds of clay: translucent, white translucent and Premo white. I went ahead and made 36 little squares of each of my clay colors, to get 108 squares of clay all together.
Then I added my drops of tints on the base pieces: one drop of red, yellow and blue on two squares of clay of each clay color and then two drops for the mixes red/yellow, yellow/blue and blue/red.
I spread the tint drops out on the clay with some cotton swabs to give them a bigger surface area and make it easier to dry out. I let them sit overnight. They were still not completely dry the next day, but this year we have the wettest summer known to mankind. Nothing dries at all. It is very messy to mix clay with tints and I strongly advise you to use gloves for protection, when you start mixing your colors. And do work on a work surface that is easy to clean!
I also opted to mix the little pieces by hand and not with my pasta machine, because I did not want to get the mess all over my pasta machine! It´s only a little amount so that was not an issue, but since I had a lot of them it did take quite some time!
After I mixed the tints into the clay, the tints did not come off anymore and I could start using my pasta machine.
Then I started working on the fractions for the color mixes: The easiest was to use One solid (1 drop tint + 1 square clay) and then cut half of that amount: so ½ drop, ¼ drop, 1/8 drop, 1/16 drop and finally 1/32 of a drop. To those cut out pieces I added as much un-tinted clay that it would fill up the amount to make a complete clay square. So the smaller the tinted fraction pieces where the more they got “diluted” and the less intense would the final color be.
I cut those fractions on all my mixing samples and started exchanging pieces. And them mixed them of course. Then I rolled them out on the next thinner setting on my pasta machine, cut them out with my cutter and used a set of stamps to mark all of the different mixes. I wanted to be able to identify them, even when I mixed them. I used R= red, Y=yellow, B=blue for the original tints. RB = red and blue, RY = red and yellow and YB = yellow and blue. The numbers are for the fractions, starting with 0 for no tint, 1 for 1 drop, 2 for ½ drop, 4 for ¼ drop and so on.
Having done all that I cured my pieces. The cured clay looks quite a bit different to the uncured, as was to be expected.
I have taken great care to make my tint mixing very carefully, so I can repeat what I have done and replicate the colors. It took me much longer that I had planned at first. So I will do my next sample pieces (especially the liquid clay samples!) another day. But I do feel confident now to find the right amount of tint for any upcoming project!
