Lumiere Paint on Polymer Clay

Jacquards Lumière Paint 

I finally got round to ordering myself some Lumière paints for my polymer clay, I've had my eyes on these gorgeous colours for quite sometime and once they arrived it dawned on me that I don't actually know what Lumière paints really are.

Jacquards Lumiere Paint - Exciter Pack

 What are Lumière Paints

Well turns out they are acrylic paints, Lumière paints are a range of paints that are metallic or pearlescent in colour.  They appear quite thick and are said to 'brush on like butter' and have been designed not to spread unlike alcohol inks.  They are also usable on many types of surfaces such as silk , fabric, paper, leather, wood and of course polymer clay.

Testing Lumiere Paint on Polymer Clay

I am using the Jacquard Lumière Exciter Pack and tested each colour on cooked and uncooked strips of clay to test application and check for colour difference, I also tested on both black and white clay to see the difference in colour.  The drying time for these samples was quite quick, most where touch dry within 30 mins, I expect this will vary depending on the thickness of application.

Uncooked Clay Application

Uncooked Clay Application - testing Lumière paints

Cooked Clay Application

Cooked Clay Application - testing Lumière paints

As you can see there is no difference in the colour when applied to either cooked or uncooked clay, some of the paints really stand out on the black clay.

Lumière Paint & Polymer Clay Project

This project comes from the Polymer Pizzaz - 27 Great Polymer Clay Projects by Bead & Button called Painterly Polymer by Dotty McMillan.

Lumière paint application on 3 clay sheets

I decided to stick to similar colours as those used on the project photos, and took the opportunity to test the application using three different methods   

1. Far left was created using the coarse side of a sponge.
2. Middle application was created using my finger 
3. Far right application was created using a sponge

For my project sheet I settled with the sponge application below

Lumiere paint on polymer clay sheet

 After allowing to dry I stamped onto the clay sheet using a black ink and a small decorative stamp, which was hard to distinguish on the sheet due to my initial colour choice of paints.

Lumiere paint on polymer clay beads

 Again after allowing to dry, it was time to make the beads for the project and this is unfortunately where I ran into problems.  Each bead I made would crack, despite my reducing the centre to a smaller side when it came to sealing the edge together it would still crack, I do think this is because the paint had somewhat dried out the clay making it less flexible a way around this maybe to make the beads first, even cooked before the paint application is applied.

And so I scrapped them so that I could use the remain sheet to have an experiment and play around.  Heres what I made

Lumière paint on polymer clay pendants

 I created some pendants with the remaining sheets and painted some Lumière paint onto the clay directly, much like its description says as the paint is quite thick and does not spread i was able to create this dotted pattern along the length of the last pendant.

Painting on polymer clay with Lumiere paint

Painting on polymer clay with Lumiere paint

You can see above I had a little play with some other colours and wanted to try out some simple painting with the Lumière paints

 

My Conclusion

Much like my first experience with alcohol inks, I've not been greatly overawed with the results from this project, I do think this could be due to my colour choice, it is too muted for my taste and I was disappointed that the beads cracked when I tried to put them together however little test with painting  holds promise and a few other tests I'd like to do are to see if a crackling effect can be achieved and also to try with metal leafing and foils.

 

Can You Help

I spent a lot of last night googling many pages trying to find projects or even links to others experiences using Lumière paints, but my hunt was somewhat fruitless.  If you have covered or now of someone that has wrote about Lumière paint and polymer clay but not excluding the paints other applications such as silk, wood and paper, I would be most grateful if you could share you links.  I think it would be great to see what else this paint is truly capable of, Thanks.