Hi there, Sandy here.
Welcome to another polymer clay tutorial at KeepsakeCrafts.net.
Just about everybody who has ever tried polymer clay has at one point jumped in and tried
the very cool technique called Mokume Gane.
Today I decided it was high time I put up a Mokume Gane video.
So Mokume Gane is actually a technique that polymer clayers took from Japanese sword making
where they would layer metals and compress them and deform them and end up with these
beautiful shapes and striations in metal.
The way it's done in polymer clay is kind of similar.
Now I've seen a lot of Mokume Gane tutorials and a lot of examples of it and I have to
say maybe I'm a snob, but I don't like it all.
I think the colors really have to be chosen carefully or it just doesn't look nice.
One thing you need is a fair amount of contrast and you need colors that look good in proximity
to each other.
So what I did was I went to my color inspirations Pinterest board and chose this kind of southwestern
color scheme and you can see here I've mixed up six clays.
The red and the orange and the turquoise, the dark gray, which was far more purple when
I looked at it more closely and the medium gray and then for the lighter gray, I'm going
to use silver leaf on some translucent clay.
So I've conditioned and rolled out pieces of clay in these different colors and I just
need to put the silver leaf on the translucent.
I really love adding translucent clay to Mokume Gane mix because it gives it very interesting
depth.
I already did an example of this and I thought there wasn't enough silver in it so I'm going
to roll this out a little bit thinner in my pasta machine and by rolling the clay out
thinner before I put the silver leaf on, I'll end up having more silver leaf in my project.
So I'm just going to do that and brush it on a little.
Here we go.
If there's a little on the edges, I'll just wrap it around the back.
This is not a technique requiring precision.
So right now I'm planning how I'm going to layer these and I want to do it with contrast.
So I'm going to put lights next to darks.
So I got this turquoise.
I'm going to put it next to this gray/purple.
This kind of peachy corally orange I think I'll put it next to the silver.
So I think I'll have the red next to the silver.
So I'm going to roll this through on the thinner thickness as well.
So that will be pretty with the red and the silver.
So with these ones, I'm just going to do the layering and I'm not even cleaning up the
edges yet.
I don't think you need to quite yet as long as your pieces are roughly the same size.
So I'm going to roll these through the pasta machine on the thickest setting and since
there's a double thickness here, they will end up being twice as long.
Once you have your pieces rolled out, you have your pairs melded together, then again
you can decide which ones are going to be next to which.
I think I'm going to have the silver and the translucent next to the turquoise.
I think I'm going to put the red and the peach together.
Cut the stack in half and then layer them on top of each other.
And now I'm going to roll this whole stack through the pasta machine.
I meant to do that before I cut them in half, but that's okay because then I would just
cut them in half and stack them again so it's not a big deal.
Roll them to just kind of meld them together and then I think I'll cut this into three
pieces and that's kind of interesting with all those ragged edges.
So I'm going to put those in the middle cause I can and put this one on top and then what
I like to do is take an acrylic block.
This one has square edges and I'm going to kind of start compressing in these ragged
edges.
I just feel like you get a lot of interest in the edges if you don't trim it all nice
and neat and then you don't waste clay either.
So after looking at this, I decided that maybe my layers were a little thick and I probably
should have run my sheets through the pasta machine maybe one more time doubled together,
but it's easy enough to remedy that.
I'm just going to use my roller and roll this out til it's about twice as big as it was
and that will flatten my sheets by half.
So it's always just a good idea to do some experimenting and see what effects you like,
what looks appeal to you.
I think that will be better.
So now I'm going to cut this in half and stack the two halves together and now I have a bunch
of nice thin layers and once again I'm going to go back and just kind of square up these
edges.
And now at this point you can really do whatever you want, make any kind of pattern you like
in the clay, but I saw something that I thought looked really cool and I experimented with
it and really like the finished effects in clay.
That is to have nesting shapes and then take your straight blade and make radial lines
and so I'm going to do that.
I'm going to start in one corner and just use my nesting set of oval cutters and just
cut all the way down to the tile with each one and you could tilt them one way or the
other.
You could make overlapping ones.
You could do this and this, but I think in this case I just really like that look of
the concentric rings.
You could do this with a round.
You could do it with any shape really.
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So there.
That's kind of a cool pattern I think and then these spaces out here that don't have
much going on, I'm just going to take a little tiny ball tool and make some holes and I'm
going to push this down as far as I can get it and I really like the way these look in
the finished Mokume Gane.
In the upper layers, they're just empty holes and when you put it over a background they
show up.
And sometimes the pieces will come apart and that's okay cause we cut them apart.
I'm just going to squidge them back together a little bit and you can make, you know, you
could keep going, but I think I'm going to stop right there.
Now at this point you don't want to try to lift the clay off the tile.
The fact that it is stuck to the tile really works to our benefit.
And now the exciting part!
We're going to start slicing into this and see what we've got.
What you need is a flexible clay blade.
This blade is just a little bit flexible, but it's fairly rigid, but you want one like
this that's very flexible.
They're very sharp when they're this thin and also this will help you to take nice thin
slivers off your clay.
So I'm just going to cut, just going to try to cut a very, very thin amount off the clay.
Ooh!
Isn't that cool? and what I have over here is just a piece of` kind of a silvery/black
clay that I rolled out on a fairly thin setting on the pasta machine already and I'm going
to use that to put these pieces down so they don't get wasted.
And I picked a color that would look good shining through.
Like here's those holes.
So that black clay is going to show through behind them.
And so you can just keep shaving.
Of course the thinner you're able to make your slices, the more you will get out of
your block of Mokume Gane and I know this doesn't look like a ton of clay, if you treat
it well and carefully, you'll get a fair amount of surface decoration out of it.
Now I think that's just really cool!
Ooh, I like that!
So you just keep doing that and then you can use this sheet that we're making over here
to decorate anything you want.
So just these little scraps here even.
I love the way those dots look.
I just think they're cool.
And because I'm doing this for the camera I'm being kind of quick, but if I was doing
this in my studio time, I would take a bit more care and really make the most of every
single one of these slices.
Using this technique of putting it on a piece of scrap clay, you can see that you can get
quite a bit of surface covered with just a smallish block of Mokume Game.
I'm going to run this through the pasta machine to smooth everything out.
And I'll just show you by point of comparison, here's some Mokume Gane I made earlier.
I did this with half as much silver leaf and you can see you do see quite a bit more silver
in here and I think my layers were thicker in this one.
I did that extra rolling out to make these thinner and so you can see the difference
in the pattern.
One good reason to make it thinner is if you want to make your sheets nice and smooth by
running them through the pasta machine, when you do that, as you roll it through, they're
going to get bigger.
Now if you have a pattern you don't want to distort, what you need to do is roll it through
on one setting, say a 3 on the pasta machine in one direction.
Give it a quarter turn and then roll it through in that direction on the 4 of the next setting
down and that will help offset the distortion that you'll get.
I mean with a pattern like this, it's not a huge deal.
So you can cut slices and use it for all sorts of things, but let me show you some things
that I made with this.
Here are a few pieces I made using this particular Sculpey cabochon molds and I made donuts and
tear drops and round bezel pieces and I think this one came out particularly beautiful.
This one has been very lightly sanded.
Remember you have a very thin veneer of your pattern so you don't want to do any aggressive
sanding, but very lightly sanded and then I applied I think probably a half a dozen
coats, nice thin coats of Sculpey gloss, sanding between the coats.
You get this really beautiful shine and you see the sparkle of the silver clay, a few
little specks of silver leaf and some of the effects of the translucent.
So let me show you how I made these.
You just need your bezel mold and your sheet of clay and then just some scrap clay.
I just need to find a cutter that's going to be slightly bigger than my shapes so that
will do and then I'll use my cutter to choose a part of the clay that I like that I think
will look nice.
That's kind of interesting.
Use your stiff blade so you don't wreck anything.
And then you just place that in the mold and then I'm going to take some of my scrap clay
and roll a nice ball.
Make sure it's nice and conditioned and then I'm just going to press that in.
And I can see this edge slid down a little bit more.
Because it's a silicon mold you should be able to just turn it, pop that out and then
put it back in centered a little better.
That's why you want your cutter to be a little bit bigger than the bezel mold because it's
going to be round and come up the edges so it needs a little bit more.
So I think I need some more scrap clay here.
Go ahead and over fill it with scrap clay and then just push and as I push that down,
that pushes that out to the edges and just push in really nice and firmly.
I'm going to take a thin blade because it's sharper and just hold it level to the top
of the mold and trim off the excess.
And that's all there is to that.
Do your tear drops the same way.
You can just roughly cut out a piece to fit in there and then trim it afterwards if you
don't have cutters that are the right shape.
Now the donuts are a little bit trickier and I'll show you those.
So with the donut, I'm actually going to cut out the hole in the middle smaller than the
hole is, but just use one of these little, I think they're 3/16" Kemper cutters.
Cut that out and then what you want to do is take your scrap clay and roll it into a
snake and then join the ends of the snake so it's approximately the size and shape of
your mold and then go ahead and push that in.
And then I would just go ahead and bake these right in the mold.
I mean you can take them out, but so that works, but if you want a nice perfect shape,
you should just leave it in the mold and bake it.
You can also just cut a slab and I just cut a slab of my Mokume Gane from this piece.
It uses a lot more of your piece, but I thought it was kind of interesting.
I don't know that I love the gloss on this, but you can cut this into different and interesting
shapes.
If you love sanding and buffing, then this one where it's not a thin veneer, but it goes
all the way through, you could sand and buff and really bring out the shine and the translucent
layers.
So I hope that's given you some ideas for how you can make and use Mokume Gane in your
crafts.
I showed you how to use this Sculpey Cabochon mold and they also have a corresponding bezel
mold and I will be doing some playing with putting these pieces in the bezel mold and
I'll have a video on that for you soon.
So if you're interested in any of the supplies that I used here, click on the little 'i'
or the tag in the upper right of the video or the link in the description box.
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a complete supply list and links to some of these products.
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Happy creating.
Bye bye.