Through a Stone Clearly
In this last post on translucent and polymer I thought I ought to touch upon one of the oldest ways to use translucent polymer… creating faux semi-precious stones.
I don’t know if there is any semi-precious stone we can’t emulate in polymer. There are so many options and with some of the new materials we now have–different types of inks, foils, and clays that weren’t available or known in polymer’s early days–it’s a wonder that there is not more faux stone experimenting going on. Not that there isn’t any. It may just be that I wish there was more. So you can just imagine how intrigued I was when I came across Ekaterina Gamayunova’s experiments with a number of semi-precious stones. You can see some of the wonderful results she got in this composite necklace.
The allure of semi-precious stones comes from the the variation of color, texture and the way light plays through their layers of transparency. To emulate that effect we need similar layers of transparency which we get with translucent clays and liquid polymer. But we don’t need to just copy nature. We have available the boundlessness of our imagination which gives us the ability to make “stones” that nature cannot. Why not pink or red jade? Agate with square or hexagonal ‘rings’ or purple malachite? We can do what nature cannot. It’s like a nature and artist collaboration. How cool is that?
If you want to explore (or re-explore) faux semi-precious stones, you might want start by reading Ekaterina’s post on her LiveJournal page. She includes process images of her agate technique along with explanations of how she attempted to achieve different effects for different types of stone so you too can try making some of your own. Might be just the ticket for some stress-free play time in the studio this weekend.
I received a wonderful email from Rachel Carren on the early exploration of faux stone that had to be shared here:
One of the early masters of faux anything is Tory Hughes. http://www.toryhughes.com She has a strong background in geology and had been experiementing w/ faux stones and other materials successfully for 20+ years. In 2002 she wrote the book on where things stood re Faux at that time. No doubt there are many tutorials, etc since but Hughes’s book should be esteemed on the concept of faux in the same way as Nan Roche’s The New Clay is on the basics of polymer.
Tory Hughes, POLYMER, THE CHAMELEON CLAY: Art Ranch Techniques for Recreating Natural Materials, 2002
Obviously, there have since been many others who explored the idea of faux successfully. EG below does a fine job of it and I am not looking to diminish her achievement, but she is standing on the shoulders of several decades of prior experience.