I had prepared two shrine blanks to work on, and wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with them, but I knew that one of them had to involve this color combination of blue+apricot yellow/orange.
I started by gluing the wooden frame (I mitered and glued them years ago out of extra wooden trim, and set them aside for projects like this) onto a piece of chipboard. Then I glued on the altoids tin. The whole thing got a coat of white gesso, tin, wood, and chipboard, and then I started layering paint until it stopped looking crappy. The yellow took maybe 4 coats.
I’d wanted to experiment with making different sculptures and tiles with some paperclay I bought, so most of these yellow tiles are out of paperclay. Some are translucent fimo. Others are grungeboard. All of them I painted with acrylic paint. The paperclay takes paint beautifully. The grungeboard is a little more absorbent, and takes a few extra layers. I don’t like painting on fimo/polymer clay that much. It’s got a too-smooth surface that’s not absorbent at all, so the paint beads up on the surface, especially if you use cheap thin acrylics from the craft store. Once I had enough tilies painted, I dry fitted them several times. Of course it didn’t work well when I tried to glue them together. Good thing I had made more than I needed!
The clay owl I made because I’d been thinking of the tiny owls I wanted to make for the MULBERRY WANDS cover, which, at this time, is still unfinished. I painted it white and off-white. that made me think of moons. I had the polymer clay moon-face, already painted with blue interference paint. I painted the inside of the tin white, and more white, and more white, and then when it was white enough, I put in aluminum powder, which ruined the hwole effect. I’d hoped it would make it opalescent, but instead it just made it bright silver. I could have just tried to paint over it, but since I wanted a milky, translucent, gloaming whiteness, instead I melted some white beeswax and poured it in there. this had the added effect of providing an adhesion to attach hte moon and owl. The owl since broke off, but it still looks okay.
I had to use the good acrylic paint to get the dark blue on the outside, since the cheap paints didn’t look blue enough. I knew I wanted small stars in white all over it, and so I went to Michaels, searching for a small star stamp. I have larger ones, but they wouldn’t work for the effect I wanted. I couldn’t find what I wanted. Once I started thinking about it, I realized that the perfect thing to use would be a rubber pencil eraser, on the end of a pencil, carved into the shape of a star. It was easy–way easier than driving to Michael’s! The paint isn’t as opaque as I had hoped, but it will do.
