Easy Faux Stone Technique

 This is a faux stone technique for polymer clay I have been playing with lately. It is a lot of fun and very easy. It is a technique that with just a few variations you can get all sorts of different results. A lot that aren't necessarily like real life stones, but fun none the less. I learned about this from the book,Making Polymer Clay Beads by Carol Blackburn. I am still trying different things with it and learning along the way.
  You start out with conditioned translucent clay and you chop it up into pieces. You will get different effects depending on the size of your pieces and whether or not they are all the same size. A variation would be to not just use translucent clay, or not use translucent at all.
   Next you paint the pieces with acrylic paint and allow to dry. I have the pieces laying on a sheet of plastic wrap first to catch the mess and help with the next step. At this stage you can also add in some textural matereials like sand, embossing powder, glitter. Lots of room for variation with this expecially with the embossing powder. You might want to do a trial run with a little bit of the mixture before you do a big batch. You are never quite sure what the embossing powder will look like until it bakes. In the mix above I added just a pinch of black embossing powder.
   After the paint has dried, you can use the plastic wrap to bring the pieces together to form the shape you wish to create. Cutting into the clay before it is baked will reveal the effect and sanding it after it is baked will also show off the faux treatment. You bake the clay as you normally would according to the package instructions. Here are the lavender pieces baked up sanded, buffed and one unsanded.
   Below are a couple other examples of the technique I have tried. The brown is using mostly opaque and a bit of translucent.