Hand Sculpted Mixed Media Pretty Girl necklaces

There's nothing like variety to keep you interested, engaged, and inspired. You have to jump around to different mediums...play with paint one day and maybe clay the next. In putting together our book thats what we focused on...Variety. It's great for a painter to sculpt or for a scrapbooker to tackle a mixed media canvas. For us, we have a great time taking our mixed media art skills and applying them to jewelry making. In fact there are a couple jewelry making projects in our soon to be released book. We love that its a wearable representation of your art...and it's also just so cool to play around with new supplies and styles. 

The necklaces above came together so organically. We had no real plans...just a tub of clay that we wanted to make use of...and also a box of bails, some E6000 and some little resin flowers to play around with.    

Crayola Air-Dry Clay

pencil

paper to sketch on

tracing paper

clear acrylic spray in matte finish

Acrylic craft paints

assorted paint brushes 

Heavy Body Gel Medium

E6000 adhesive (Michael's)

bails (etsy)

ball chains (etsy)

resin flowers  (Michael's)

Working on our craft sheet we just sculpted some discs of clay. Some we "cut" using bottle caps and some we hand sculpted, wanting more organic shapes. The only thing we were sure of at this point was that we wanted to paint some girls on the clay pieces. Since they were small thin pieces they took about a day and a half to dry. Thicker objects will take about three days.

This morning we picked three of the discs to become our girls. Some of the thinner discs that we had cut perfectly turned out too fragile so we went with the chunkier, more organic shapes. We did some quick preliminary sketches on paper. 

Next we tightened up our sketches, and then made tracings of each face. It's so much easier to rub a clean tracing onto the surface of the clay then it is to draw directly onto the clay. Your pencil tends to carve instead of draw. Once we had rubbed on the tracings we then sprayed the discs with a clear coat. The clear coat sealed the lines and darkened them, which made the faces much easier to paint. 

We painted in our girls faces first before choosing hair color. We like to get a feel for a face first and then consider the best choice for hair color. And just overall, we like working in steps rather than rendering everything all at once and then trying to pull it together. 

As you can see the initial sketches and final styles are a bit different. The gal with the raven hair looks so much better with these inward curls, and eyes that look off to the side instead of straight forward. And the aqua girl needed brown eyes for contrast. We really had so much fun doing these! So cool how the unplanned organic clay shapes became their hair and face shapes...right down to the little point of the chin.

We added a couple layers of heavy matte gel medium to soften their appearance and make the pieces feel even more chunky.

When the gel medium was dry we sprayed them again with a matte finish acrylic clear coat. We then flipped them over once they were dry and painted the backs of each...pink, black, and aqua respectively. And once the paint was dry we gave the backs a clear coat as well.

We had a bunch of little ball chains laying around and really liked the look of them for these. They're sweet, simple, and the focus stays on our painted girls. We used E6000 to glue on our little resin flowers and bails.

We really love how they turned out and will definitely be making more soon. We're thinking of maybe even adding them to the shop. What do you guys think? 

Its so fun to mess around with different mediums. It's the same with working out, or dieting, or even studying...you gotta throw yourself curve balls to keep your body and mind sharp. In art, the curve balls expand your comfort zone and inspire you to create even more.

We hope we've inspired you guys to mess around!

xo, Jenny & Aaron