5 May 2012

Making silver clay earrings using paper stencils – the lizard project

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It can be challenging to duplicate.objects when making silver clay earrings

Lizards have fantastic body shapes: ideal to be shaped in silver clay. Making a lizard on a leaf pendant is probably no big deal, but making earrings is a real challenge. The lizards won’t be identical, but the movement and the curves must be in line with each other.

A stencil made of thicker paper turned out to be very useful. After drawing the lizard I cut the image with a sharp stencil knife.

 Then I flipped the stencil and cut out its mirror image.
The images are mirroring each other. But the greatest challenge was yet to come. Inserting silver clay into the stencils is not easy, because you can not see your figure from both sides. The edge is not visible either. So the face and the reverse side of the lizards turned out to be slightly different. I had to do a lot of sanding down and filling up.

The nice thing about paper stencils is that they are combustible and can be fired together with silver clay. They are quite useful supporting the greenware during sanding.

 After firing and polishing off the sharp edges the result was quite nice. These lizards definitely make a pair.

And the final result will be even nicer. Here are the silver clay earrings. The lizards feel themselves completely at home on the green mother-of-pearl leaves. They are not glued but the bond is very good and the lizard’s bodies are fully integrated into the irregular leaf surface. Silver from precious metal clay can be bent after firing for a better fit, just with hands and very carefully.
Pure silver is a very adaptive metal, and that’s why I like it.

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