How To Make Landscape Jasper- Faux Stone Tutorial by Tina Holden

 This post was written by Smoosher member Tina Holden of Beadcomber.
Tina Holden’s Faux Stone Tutorial- Landscape Jasper
Jasper is often named according to its pattern: landscape jasper, the most popular, offers a small panorama in stone. Often the name Landscape or Picture is interchanged for this type of Jasper. I’ve devised a simple way to recreate it with polymer clay. You only require clay, some chalk, your hands and fingers for this technique. No blade, no machine, not even a roller! This maybe the shortest tutorial I have ever written as well, lol. Stone examples:

Polymer Clay bead:

Materials:
Ecru polymer clay
Chalk/Artist soft chalk pastels in beige, rust, brown, dark brown, black
Tools:
Pasta machine or Acrylic Roller (optional)

1) Condition and roll clay on largest setting of pasta machine or use an acrylic roller to roll to about a 1/8” thickness. You can also flatten the clay using your fingers as the objective isn’t a smooth flat sheet, but rough strips of clay. Let it rest a bit or put in the fridge/freezer for a couple of minutes as warm clay doesn’t tear up easily. Tear strips, various widths and sizes.

2) Crumple the pieces up and smoosh them together. Don’t roll smooth, you want the rough edges.

3) Apply the various chalk colours on the outside of the rough pieces. Start with the lightest colour and add darker colours last. Your finger is the paint brush. Don’t worry if your piece has fingerprints, they actually are an added feature here, creating a nice matrix that won’t look like a fingerprint in the finished bead, but more like speckles!

4) Roll or shape your piece flat and again. Again, let rest or put in fridge or freezer to cool. Tear into strips and pieces like before.

This time, before assembling and smooshing the pieces together, apply dark brown and black on the rough edges of some strips. Then smoosh together and roll into a ball for a bead, or flatten and smooth for a pendant, or create
another shape. Now is the time to smooth away any fingerprints as well, sorry, lol. You may find it helpful to use a dusting of cornstarch on your hands and fingers. Cornstarch clogs up those fine crevices and ridges in your fingers and hands and make the smoothing process easier
.

What do you think? Simple, huh?
You can also use other base colours and other chalk colours for this Landscape technique.

You can find Beadcomber online at http://beadcomber.artfire.com , http://beadcomber.blogspot.com,
http://facebook.com/beadcomber, http://flickr.com/tinaholden.
Thanks for reading!

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