Nerikomi duck making

Creating images rather than simple / complex patterns seems a lot more difficult to do with nerikomi. I’ve been trying to copy techniques that polymer clay artists use to make canes, so make circular / square repeated images, but the image always gets very distorted unlike theirs when I reduce the block into a cane.

These daisies for example came out with very wobbly petals

Before making the first cane, I make simple sketches of a duck that I can make and still be clear what it is

I rolled out and stacked yellow, pink, blue, and white dyed clays together to form a duck block I could squeeze & reduce to size.

After rolling it out and cutting it, it only looks very vaguely like a duck

I tried again with a round shape instead of square to see if rolling it instead of squeezing sides makes a difference in warping.

I think it ended up crazier than the previous one.

I’m going to make plates from these results anyways, if only to see how the color comes out. The image I cut off get a lot bigger after rolling it out into a slab, but I’d rather them be smaller, so I need to cut them closer to the thickness of the slab.