Skinner Blend Basics

Beth Kazee Curran, Columbus Polymer Clay Guild

Setting Up and Reading a Standard Skinner Blend

The first step in setting up a Skinner blend is to learn how to read the colors. Do this by making a drawing of how you think your blend should be set up, and then placing a straightedged object, such as your clay blade, on the blend in a vertical position. The color of the finished blend at that position can be predicted by looking at the proportional mix of the colors that the blade crosses.

In the picture below, the left line crosses mostly red with some yellow. At this point the blend will be red-orange. The middle line crosses yellow with a bit of red; here the blend will be yellow-orange, and the right line shows where the blend will be blue-green. Note that if you use triangular shapes to set up your blend, there will be virtually no pure yellow, red, or blue in the finished blend.

In order to get pure colors, start with truncated triangles.

Notice that the yellow area is a bit wider than the red or blue. This is because the yellow is less saturated than the other two colors, and tends to get lost while blending. Starting with a wider area of less saturated colors ensures that the finished blend will have roughly equal amounts of all colors.

Blending the Sheet

Distortion of Skinner blends during the repeat trips through the pasta machine is often a problem. You can minimize this with a few tricks:

• As you fold the blend, line up the stripes of color, rather than lining up the edges of the sheet.
• When you put the folded edge into the pasta machine, take a moment to settle the entire length of the fold into the crevice between the rollers, before you start rolling.
• Turn the crank at a moderate pace and use the thickest pasta machine setting. This plus the settling of the fold will prevent the sheet from sliding into a slanted shape.
• Flip the folded sheet left to right after each time you fold it, before it goes into the pasta machine. In other words, for the above blend, the red side of the blend will be on the handle side of the pasta machine on one pass, and on the opposite side on the next pass. The reason for this is that almost all pasta machines have misaligned rollers, so that they are closer together on one end than on the other. If you keep the sheet lined up the same way every time, the blend will grow a peak at the end where the rollers are closer together.
• If the ends of the blend develop humps or valleys, even them out by folding only the uneven end onto the rest of the sheet, rather than folding the sheet in half, for the next couple of passes through the machine. If you do this before the ends become too badly distorted, they’ll work right back in to the blend with no problem.

Making a Balanced Blend

When blending a saturated and a desaturated color, such as black and white, the finished sheet will have a more even color distribution if you set up your blend with less of the saturated color. (Hint: You can determine how saturated a color is by imagining, or actually making, a black and white photocopy of the block of clay. The darker the copied image, the more saturated the color is.) You can remember how to set this up by remembering to “take a bite out of the black clay.” The shape of the saturated color will be curved inward where the saturated color touches the desaturated color.

Notice that the area of pure white is larger than the area of pure black, to assure that there is still pure white at the right edge after blending. You can also do this with the yellow area of a three-color blend, to obtain a more balanced orange and green:

Jelly Rolls

If you’re making a blend to be rolled up into a jelly roll, it’s very important to maintain pure color at each side of the blend, so that you can add more of the color that will be on the outside – that is, the side opposite the side where you’re going to start rolling. The finished jelly roll will look more balanced if there is more of the outside color.

In the picture above, the left-hand setup is for a jelly roll that will be rolled up starting with the dark side, and the right-hand setup will be rolled starting with the light side. You can also just make the blend as usual, but before you roll it up, cut off some of the inner color (i.e. the end that you’ll start rolling up) and add more of the outer color.

French-Fry Blends

A “French-fry blend” is my favorite way to set up a rainbow blend, because it assures even amounts of all 6 colors in the blend. Before you set up the blend, you need to mix small amounts of your primary colors to find the proportions that make the most pleasing secondary colors. This is most easily done by rolling out a small piece of each color, cutting bits out with a small circle cutter, and mixing the colors, counting the number of circles of each color that are needed to get the color you want. In this example, I’ve found that two parts yellow plus one part pink makes a good orange, two parts pink plus one part blue makes a nice violet, and two parts yellow plus one part blue makes a good green. Using these proportions, lay out strips of colors in the desired order. It’s not necessary to pre-mix the secondary colors. This layout will produce, from left to right, a yellow-orange-pink-violet-blue-green blend. Notice that the orange strip contains one part pink and two parts yellow, in accordance with the proportions I worked out with small portions of clay. The other secondary colors are set up in the same way.

The yellow is a bit wider than the other colors, just as for a triangular blend. The colors will blend along the vertical lines as you run the sheet through the pasta machine. However, for this type of blend it is especially important to keep the ends from becoming too distorted. French-fry blends work especially well for pastel colors, which you can make by laying out the blend with thin sheets of colored clay on a thick sheet of white. In that case, however, make the strips at the left and right sides wider than the others, because the outside edges don’t always blend thoroughly and will need to be cut off the finished blend.

French-fry blends have more defined stripes than triangular blends. If you want a more diffuse blending between colors, just offset the stripes of color a bit when you fold it before you roll it through the pasta machine, instead of lining them up precisely, and the blended areas will increase. In that case, it’s a good idea to make the initial setup with slightly wider strips of primary colors than secondary colors, to allow for the loss of primary color that will occur by the offset folding.

Blends Made with Additives

You can make Skinner blends by adding pigments, such as inks, dyes, oil paints, mica powders, or sand, to neutral colored clays (white, ecru, pearl, translucent, etc.). It’s not necessary to pre-mix the additives into the clay, if they can be adhered to a clay sheets. Just paint the pigment onto the neutral sheet in the same configuration you’d use for colored clays and blend, folding the pigment inside the sheet on the first fold. As you blend, if you see that the developing colors aren’t intense enough, just paint another layer of pigment onto the partially blended sheet in the same way as you did the first time, and continue blending. If you’re using paint, make sure the paint dries before you blend the sheet, or else the paint will get trapped under the knife-edge which is located under the rollers, in which case it will emerge unexpectedly to add unwanted tints to sheets of clay.

Narrowing Blends

I use two different ways to narrow a Skinner blended sheet (I’ve tried others, but these are the two that have worked for me). The first way is to roll the finished blend up, starting with a striped edge, not with the single-color edge as you would for a jelly roll, so that you obtain a log that, when laid out on its side flat in front of you, has bands of color from left to right. Reduce the log until it is about as wide as you want the finished blend to be, lay it on its side again, and press down on it to flatten it out. Now it will look like a short, thick Skinner blend. Continue pressing down on it, and roll it in the same direction as the stripes using a roller or brayer, until it has lengthened and is no more than twice as thick as the thickest setting on your pasta machine. Run it through the pasta machine on the thickest setting, in the usual direction (i.e. striped edge goes into the rollers), keeping an even tension on the sheet as you run it through so that it doesn’t move sideways. You should have a long, narrow Skinner blended sheet.

The second way takes more time and is a bit more difficult to learn, but will usually result in a more evenly striped sheet, especially if some of your colors are a bit softer than others. This process can be done simultaneously with making the blend, or after the blend is finished. Each time you fold the sheet in half preparatory to running it through the machine, compress the sides and inner parts of the sheet inwards toward the center, by pressing inwards with your thumbs on one face of the sheet and your fingers on the other. The reason you do this after you fold the sheet is that it is easier with the thicker sheet. The sheet will be a bit narrower and a bit thicker after you finish compressing it. Run it through the pasta machine and repeat with each successive folding, until the sheet is as narrow as you want it.