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Carved Cameo

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Carved Cameo

Use Polymer Clay to Make Cameo

Cameo is the strategy of carving an item of jewelry. Historically, cameos are made of 3 main carving materials such as : glass, shells, or agate. They have dyed powerful colored layers, but the most common colors for 2 layers are white on black, white on blue, and white on red-brown.

recently, many workmen consider the polymer clay and porcelain as good alternatives to use in making cameos. You want sharper tools and more suitable base materials if you'd like to have a nice clean finished product. Polymer clay jewelry is inexpensive and material costs are kept down.

Prepare at least two colors of polymer clay, ordinarily used are ivory for the cameo part and darker color contrast for the background. You can mix some ivory canes or balls in some darker color clay to have marbleized or shaded background. Just make sure that the clay you wish to is well conditioned. Mostly, molds don't need a release agent, but if in case sticking happens, try and spray the sticked clay to the mold with water or dust it with corn starch.

Take a bit of ivory clay and place it by pressing it into the cameo portion of the mildew. You may use the paint brush handle or a chisel headed clay sharper in tamping down the clay. Just work thoroughly and slowly to get all the cameo's detail. Preferably, leave some convexity to the ivory clay.

You can leave a thin section of the ivory to make a gorgeous translucent filmy look.

Smoothing the fringe of the design is the most important step in the level of cameo making. Smooth edge is very important because when the dark clay base is added to the mildew, this could give you the nice sharp edge you wanted between the cameo and the background.

Make a proper thickness for your mold by rolling out a little piece of the background clay. Press the mold softly on top of it to make a shape mark for cutting. Then, cut the background and lay it into the mold. Tamp around the edge and gently work until you reached the center, just apply less pressure when you're at the cameo part, in this way you can avoid ooze to the ivory clay.

If you detect that the clay isn't well leveled, just gently put additional background color to top it off. In leveling the back portion, you may use the paintbrush handle or the clay sharper. And ultimately, bake it. Learning the easy way to use jewelry making tools, their correct usage won't only help you in learning how to improve artistry but will make your work quicker and better. All great craftsmen learned slowly and took many years to become great artists. Knowing your tools will help you become better quicker.

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