It wasn’t hard—you just need patience and you have to know what you want. I’m sure you could make one too.
Mmkay. It’s insanely long, but I tried to explain everything as thoroughly as possible...
How to Make an Avatar Pendant: The Ilyus Excessive WayMaterials:
-Decorative Glass Gem
-Pendant Mount (style of your choice)
-Acrylic Craft paint (colours of your choice)
-Needle (or small brush meant for detail work—these can cost up to eight or ten dollars)
-Patience!
Decorative glass gems are often used to represent water in fake flower arrangements, but they are also great for oval/round pendants because of their shapes, their transparency, and their flat backs—ideal for painting designs. They can usually be found at your local arts and crafts store and can come in a variety of sizes, from a centimeter to two inches in diameter, though the larger sizes might be difficult to find (I had to order off the internet). WARNING: Glass gems are mass-produced, so shapes and sizes will vary! I received a package containing thirty gems and only three were round and large enough for my mount.
My chosen glass gemsTo turn your painted gem into a pendant, you’ll need a mount. This will make up the back/support and frame of your pendant and will allow you to attach it to a chain, ribbon, etc. Because The Ilyus Way involves round gems, your mount should be round too. Keep the measurements of your glass gems in mind when finding your mount! You wouldn’t want to use a mount with a ½” diameter with a gem that has a ¾” diameter.
I’m not experienced with metalworking, so I went ahead and found a mount I liked on the Internet. If you don’t have that kind of money at your disposal, you can create your own using cardboard, flat round shells (I’ve seen these in the craft section of Wal-Mart), clay, etc. In the beginning, I even toyed with the idea of taking a half-dollar coin and drilling a hole into it (hey, the government wouldn’t have known). If you want something different, you could try your hand at a
seed bead frame, but that takes more materials and more work.
My chosen mountYou should draw some pictures of your pendant design ahead of time to get a feel for how you want it to look and what colour scheme to use. My first picture was what you’d expect it to be—red circle with the black firebending symbol stuck in the middle of it. However, I wanted to add gold so it would share something similar to my chosen mount (I like things to blend together—without gold in my painting the design and gold mount would have looked too separate).
After going through four/five coloured designs, I finally settled with what you see in the first post. After all that, you can go off and buy your craft paints. I wanted my design to be shimmery and metallic to make it pop out, but working with matte colours is just as fine. If they don’t have a certain colour in metallic, you can buy a bottle of the matte version along with a bottle of either silver or gold and mix them together—mixing with silver will yield a cool colour (I mixed my dark red with it and got metallic magenta) while mixing with gold will yield a warm colour (this is why the red of my design looks slightly orange, but I was willing to sacrifice a bit of the red hue for a metallic look).
Using a needle is pretty self-explanatory. Your larger paintbrushes are just too big to use for details (which is what your entire design will be, background colour excluded), and the brushes that are so small you can barely see them are expensive.
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After you have all your materials and your design planned, you can start working on the pendant. The back of your glass gem shouldn’t be as neatly polished as the front, so go ahead and draw your design onto it in pencil—be sure to draw it backwards so it will be facing the right direction in the finished product! Practice some ahead of time. The outline of my design was black so the graphite blended in with it. If you’re painting, say, the waterbending symbol and you plan on using a light blue as the outline, test the pencil method on a glass gem you wouldn’t mind trashing. That way you can see if the graphite will show up after you’ve painted your blue outline on it.
Now I’m going to be more specific by showing you how I painted mine…
So the design is painted on and everything is dry and protected. Next is the mount, which will be different for you depending on what you choose. Mine had pieces of metal that I could bend over the gem to hold it in place—much like how they put gemstones onto rings. If you made something yourself and are satisfied with how it looks around your painted gem (remember, the mount is a frame as well as a support), then go ahead and glue those suckers together. Use something strong so it will last for a long while.
That’s about it, I believe. Sorry it’s so long. If there’s anything else I can help with, just ask and I’ll see if I can explain it for you. =D