Pearlescent Clay

A beautiful accent to all your sculpted projects can be accomplished with pearlescence. It adds lightness, shimmer, and a hint of glitz, depending on how you use it. I use it for making shimmery, satin like clothing for human sculptures and lifelike shimmering flowers. Pearl is great for delicate feminine projects as well as interesting cabochons. Now, there's a few methods at which you can accomplish this look.

Pearl clay is great for big projects. It comes in lots of Colors and plenty of brands carry it (Fimo, Sculpey III, Premo!) Its extremely shimmery. It is also great for accents on regular clay projects and easy to control.

Pearl Powers are also wonderful products! They come in ton s of colors and are created by a couple brands. Pearl Ex is my personal favorite. Pearl Ex comes in a fairly big container and the company carries TONS of colors! If this brand isn't for you, or you're looking for a smaller container,  I've seen combo packs at Hobby Lobby. Each combo pack contains about 4 coordinating pearl pigments and 3 glitters, all in small interlocking circle canisters. Either way you can't go wrong. You can dip small projects in pearl powder or you can easily brush it on. There's tons of techniques you can use with this product, each giving a completely unique look to your project. My advice? Experiment.

 

Along with pearl power, shimmery eye shadow or makeup can be used with great effect. Either break up the makeup or brush from the cake directly. It's cheap, convienient, and looks good on the clay as well as your face! This can be used with pretty much the same techniques as pearl powder. The brand I've tried is Lip Smacker's Dazzle Dust, but don't be afraid to try out different shades of dazzling eye shadow. It comes in a small compact and comes in two colors: pale pink and white. 

Despite the colors, this stuff is fairly transparent and works good on any color clay, the same being said for pearl ex (White). If you don't want to buy all the colors (Trust me, it's gets expensive), just get white. It doesn't actually show up stark white, so it looks good on everything, letting most of the clay's color to show through. 

Another great technique to use with shimmer makeup or pearl powder is directly mixing it into the clay. The pearl effect does become much more subtle, but it creates the look of actually pearl clay.