Small saleable Boxes 2 My second go at making small saleable boxes. As with the previous post they are decorated with egg shell, pau shell and gold dust, plus a bit of home made banding left from another project. The boxes are finished with coats of polyurethane and then the decorative lid is applied to a flat polish polyurethane surface, before more coats of ploy are added to cover the shell and get a new flat surface that can be polished.
On the one below I tried some new embellishments. There's a synthetic opal dot in the bottom left corner, plus the usual gold dust sprinkled 'comet' trail. But I found some metal phone stickers on AliExpress - the two circular geometric discs. They are peel and stick - and adhered really well to a flat polish (but not waxed) poly surface finished with up to 3000 grit mesh. There's an amazing range on Ali which includes animal shapes as well. You can find them as metal phone stickers or scrapbooking stickers. But more on the scrapbooking stickers in my next post. You need to use the metal ones, the other stickers are gold printed on clear plastic and you have to peel and stick the plastic to the box.
Once stuck on, numerous coats of ploy are applied to cover the metal elements and regain a flat surface that can be polished. The one below was an attempt at another Japanese decorative style - Kintsugi This is were a broken or smashed piece of preciouses ceramic wear is glued back together using gold impregnated lacquer or glue. It also has one of the gold geometric stickers top right!
The quality of the stickers is amazing! I'm looking forward to trying more.
The one below uses strips of pau shell and gold mother of pearl shell cut from laminated sheets of shell. Half way through decorating the top my wife said it looked like city high rise landscape, so I decided to add a moon - mother of pearl dot, and stars - gold dust.
