Love at Sea

I love how the waves crash over the lovers in this art piece that I created based on an antique illustration of "Manon Lescaut." This is my entry for the Polymer Clay Artist Guild of Etsy monthly challenge. Public voting opens Aug. 1 so I'll keep you posted on that.

I started with a photo copy of the original and colored it using markers, paints, and alcohol inks embedded in liquid polymer to create a "canvas" that I sculpted into a polymer clay Mokume Gane sea, adding more coats of liquid polymer as well as regular polymer accents to build dimension. A post that I wrote a while ago, Freedom in Mokume Gane, has some background on this technique used to create the waves.

The technique was so much fun, I decided to create a tutorial to share it. Both the tutorial and the original artwork are available in my shop. If you are interested in either, visit the links in the photo captions.