Starry Night Polymer Clay Technique

The Starry Night Polymer Clay Technique was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh and is one of my favorite techniques for using up leftovers. In this tutorial I'll show you four fun variations.

You can use it to make many different shapes and patterns depending on how you manipulate the cane. It’s fun to make and can turn your leftovers into something really beautiful.

You will need the following supplies:

Leftover polymer clay
Black polymer clay
A tissue blade
An acrylic roller
A pasta machine

The Starry Night Polymer Clay Technique

To start you’ll need some fairly colorful leftovers. Ugly leftovers won't work.
You will also need a sheet of black polymer clay rolled out on the thickest setting of your pasta machine.
Roll your leftovers into a ball and then into a fat log.
Lay the log of clay on the sheet and trim the sheet to the same width as the log.
Wrap the black around the log until the black meets black.
Press lightly then unroll slightly and you should have left a line in the clay.
Cut your clay along this line and wrap back around. You should find that the two ends of the black sheet meet up perfectly with no overlap.
Roll the cane against your work surface to smooth up the seam and to get rid of air bubbles.
Reduce the log down to about a half cm diameter.

Now comes the fun part. You can mold this cane into anything. I like to take sections of the cane and roll it into a nautilus shape.

Cut your cane into sections.
Pinch one end of a section then roll from the thin end to the thick end into a nautilus or snail shape.
You can make as many different sizes as you want to.
Push these pieces all together and roll them out flat using your acrylic roller. Roll in multiple directions to prevent distortion.
Run the sheet through your pasta machine on the thickest setting to even it out.
Rotate 90 degrees and run through a medium setting on your pasta machine.
Take your flexible tissue blade and carefully shave off the top layer of black to reveal the pattern underneath. Keep these shavings too as you can use them in other polymer clay projects.
Roll over your sheet gently with an acrylic roller to flatten it out.

This is just one of the ways you can manipulate the Starry Night cane.

You can bend the cane into squiggles. You could roll the sections into little balls. You could even just take the sections and butt them up together and it will look almost like a messy basket weave. There are so many ways to use this, so play around and have fun.

See the video for examples.