Create your own gem stones!

Some time has passed since my last post again and many things have happened. I had two further jobs as Alexstrasza at MCMExpo in London and the Triple Play V in Leipzig, kept on working on my old projects and started with new ones and just had a great time again. 

And I still have big plans for this year!

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Druid Tier 9 with Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest from World of Warcraft

Wizard from Diablo III

Demon Hunter from Diablo III

Ha ha, you see I keep on sticking with Blizard this year and I guess I will bring the Wizard and my Druid Tier 9 to Blizzcon. Hotel, flight, car and tickets are already booked and I cannot wait for an amazing week in California again! 

Unfortunately I haven't made a lot of progress in the last time, so I'm not able to show you so much this time. But many of you asked me, how I created the gems of my Alexstrasza costume and that's the main part of this post: How to create your own gems! (And I already have to excuse for my english, but this part was pretty hard to write because of all the new terms for me. And I hope you know at least what I'm talking about!)

At first, you have to know what materials you need: Resin, resin colors or nail polish, modeling clay, mold boxes, silicone, metallic foil, pastic cups, scale, wooden sticks, gloves, sand paper and acrylic spray lack. It's a lot of stuff you have to buy and surely it's not really cheap to buy all this for some little gems. So, better try to share the costs with your friends or just don't forget that you will need this stuff in the future later, too. I bought this stuff last year and I'm sure it will last for many further projects in the next years. (Btw: Click here for the link of the ebay shop for this materials. )

Now let's talk about the first step: Your original form. I used the modeling clay Apoxie Sculpt for this step. It's pretty easy to work with, have a clean surface when it's dried and it's very solid. As you can see, I also created some golden fixing for my gems with this form, too and Wonderflex was just perfect for this part (like many more costume parts, ha ha!). 

Now were coming to the mold. Put your orignal forms into the mold box and make sure that there is no space between the ground of the box and your form. You better add some plasticine or something similar between both to get rid of the space. Now cover your original gem with some molding wax or power. Then it's much easier to seperate your gem from the dried out silicone later. You can also put a stick or something else into the modling box, so it will be easier to take the mold out of the box. The next step is just to follow the instructions on your silicone box and cover your gems with the mixture. 

Depending on the silicone you have to wait a while until your mold gets solid. Better wait longer then needed and remove your mold carefully from the molding box when it became solid. As you can see I tried to mix some colors with the mold, but I had many failures at this time of experimenting.

The left one is the result of the picture before. You see, that your resin becomes too dark and less transparence if you add too much colors. The two purle ones at the top are tries with less color, but I still wasn't satiesfied with the result and finally decided for the esiest and best way I found after my researches. Here you'll find a tutorial. So, I just made a cast out of resin without any colors (you also just have to follow the steps of your resin instruction) and found the next problem. 

Some of my gemstones had a rough surface and wasn't completely transparent. Sandpaper helped me to get a clean surface again, but as you can see in the left picture, the surface wasn't really... gem-like anymore. But some layers of arcrylic spray finish solved this problem, too! You can also use it to make your gems a bit more shiny!

Now I covered the back of my gem with different colors of nail polish. I used 6 different ones and added some highlights like glitter or pretty dark colors. I didn't mix the colors, but always waited until the last layer of nail polish dried and covered everything with a base coler when I was satiesfied with the result.

At the end I just glued a metallic foil to the back and added the golden fixing. 

Yeah, and these are all the gems I made. None of them looks like the other and I love their multi-colored look. I guess they would have looked more natural if I haven't used the glitter nail polish, but I love the glitter, ha ha! 

Yeah, and that's the final result. I hope, this little tutorial will help you a little bit with your own projects and I'm very sorry that I didn't explain the mixing of the silicone and the resin very well or missed some other parts. This tutorial was really hard for me to write and I'm sure that the instructions at the back of your material cans is the best tutorial you can find for this step. And I hope you can see, that it's really not hard to create gems by yourself and it's worth to buy all these materials for this step. 

At the moment I still have a lot to do because of all my projects and my job as Alexstrasza. The next event will be the Dark Moon Faire in Rimini from 1st till 3rd July and I'm already pretty excited. Ha ha, and my wedding at July 7th is also still waiting for me, so I'm already a bit... stressed. However I keep on posting all my progress on my facebook progress page and if you're insterested just visit me there! 

So, thanks again for reading and have fun and good luck with your own projects! Keep being busy and creative, guys!