I’ve always loved dichroic glass and I’ve been wanting to try and make it in polymer clay for some time now. I couldn’t find a suitable tutorial anywhere on the internet, that gave the effect I was looking for. I know I’ve seen one, I just don’t know where!
I decided to go ahead a try anyway – after all, I have all these gorgeous foils and glitters just dying to be played with. So what if I don’t have Kato clear medium (yet!) – right? I’ve got other stuff and where there’s a will, there’s a way. Of course there’s the right way and the wrong way too, but these are the things you learn in the course of an experiment. <grin>
First off I hauled out the black clay, got that conditioned and rolled out on
the thickest setting on the pasta machine. Then came the fun part. Some pearlescent inks randomly applied in patches, some gold and silver leaf even more randomly applied. Jones Tones foils – rubbed on. Some worked, some didn’t. Those were re-assigned to the stamping stuff! I rolled the sheet through the pasta machine first in one direction – 1 setting thinner – and then in the opposite direction, another setting thinner.
At this stage it was looking pretty awesome with bits of black showing through nicely. Hmmm…… getting where I wanted it to be, but!… the layered look was still missing.
The craft knife came out and I started cutting random shapes from the sheet and cured those on a flat ceramic tile. The next challenge was to get the layered glossy look. I’ve been sitting with a bottle of Polyglaze forever. It didn’t work out for the minis, but maybe it would work for this experiment. It got hauled out and I applied the first layer of glaze to a piece of the cured sheet. It was rather like doing flood icing I found. Pipe the outer edge then carefully fill in the centre, making sure there were no air bubbles and that the application was even. When it was almost dry I hauled out my glitters – holographic silver, fine blue and ultra fine gold. I used a paint brush to scatter glitter onto some areas of the piece. Then I applied a second coat of the polyglaze and let it dry completely.
Some of the pieces I surrounded with a rope of clay and cured before applying the glaze, since the pieces can’t be baked again once the polyglaze is applied.
In the course of researching the polyglaze I discovered that if you touch the
glaze while drying and before sealing, it reacts to the oils from your hands and goes cloudy. I’ld been warned, but got to see the effects first hand! So we learn!! I used fimo varnish to seal the pieces. In the photo you can see the cloudiness in the centre of the “k”.
All in all I’m happy with the way they turned out. I want to experiment with different colour backgrounds to see what happens. It’s fun! All the little scraps that were left over when I cut the sheets also resulted in some lovely little desk accessories for myself and the kids.
