This has now found its proper home, and the lucky winner has very kindly given me a photo to post.

Here’s the first of the pieces of epoxy jewellery I posted about recently, modelled by its happy new owner. The image links to a larger closeup view. When I’ve passed over the other two to their final destinations, I’ll see if I can get pictures of those to show off too.

Here are three of the pieces I was experimenting with at the beginning of February – I’ve been working on them on and off, coat after coat of paint and then varnish, and now they’re sitting on my desk waiting to go to their new owners. They’re all prototypes – I’m happy with the look of each of them, but there are lessons to be learned from them all too.

Pendant, 45×65mm, weighs 21g. Ultramarine swirled panel in an epoxy setting, with an antiqued bronze finish. One of the advantages of using two-part epoxy over polymer clay is that it cures at room temperature, rather than having to be heated in the oven, so I can use acrylic paints and (as here) inset rectangles of artist’s mountboard, without worrying about what that sort of heat will do to it. Next time I do one of these, I’ll drill a larger hole (or two holes) to loop cord through directly, rather than trying to bend a jump ring threaded through that thickness of solid material.

Brown & gold choker slide, 35mm square, weighs 8g. Sits a bit lower on the ribbon than it does in the picture – next time, I’ll centre the slide on the back a bit more. I actually made three others using the same paper, but didn’t clean the work area quite thoroughly enough and got flecks of epoxy on the front surface. So that’s another area to be careful with.

Aventurine & bronze choker slide, 20×30mm, weighs around 12g. Aventurine cabochon stone in an epoxy setting, with an antiqued bronze finish. I need to be a bit more careful about moulding the epoxy around the slide – this one ended up weighing a bit more than it had to, and I had to clear the slide holes with a scalpel after it had finished curing.

This is a new technique for me, but I think it’s worked out. The pendant is a 35mm square of artist’s mountboard, covered in something like six layers of acrylic paint and varnish (well, gloss gel glaze – it functions perfectly as a varnish, with the added advantages of being more durable and less sticky on skin than picture varnish) with a ribbon loop glued on the back.

It turns out that Rheotech gloss gel medium – which I actually use much more often as a clear or tinted glaze, since it’s better at covering odd surfaces than picture varnish is, and it’s more permanent – interacts really badly with printer’s ink. It picks it up and smears it around, making a peculiar hazy grey smudge everywhere.

Whilst it’s an interesting effect, and one I’ll almost certainly want to use some other time, it’s just ruined a collage I was making, so I’m quite annoyed.

This is a collage piece I made for the Eastercon art show, pretty much entirely as an experiment. It’s one of my favourite SF short stories, Omnilingual by H Beam Piper (Project Gutenberg link) done using your basic papier-mache technique on a Daler board base. The discolouration is done with two layers of tinted glaze (gold, then brown) and edged with black acrylic. I’m quite pleased with the result, and I think I’ll have to do some more of these in the future.

Another experiment – I picked up two new colours and a new gloss medium, and wanted to try them all out.

The background is Hooker’s Green (System 3), and the metalwork is done using Ara Dark Bronze. This is gorgeous stuff, but it’s a nasty one to clean up – I had to go back to one brush and wash it over again. The catalogue suggested that the Rheotech gloss medium would also work as a hard, permanent, waterproof glaze/varnish, so I decided to try that out too. It ends up as a relatively low gloss, but still brings out the colour of the background beautifully.

I need to work on getting a more even texture for the varnish, but it still works.

I’m normally reluctant to varnish things, but this seems to have worked out.

[Edited and recreated, because I accidentally overwrote it with the text of another post.]