Supplies:

• A color of polymer clay you’ll be using for the base. You can use whatever you’d like, but it will be visible. I chose to use a really dark blue.
• A needle tool or toothpick
• Blue pearl ex or eyeshadow
• Various shades (3-5) of blue polymer clay
• 2 shades of yellow: a light and a medium
• An exacto knife

For this project, I chose to leave out the houses and the black accents, focusing my work on the blue and yellow. I have 4 distinguishable bands in this experiment: a dark blue section at the top, a light blue section in the middle, another dark blue strip just underneath, followed by a yellow line at the bottom (although I do not cover the entire rectangle).

Step 1: Prepare your base

For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m working with a flat 2D piece, but feel free to translate it as you need to! I took my dark blue clay and flattened it out into a rectangle big enough for me to get a sense of the technique.

For my flat piece, I chose to trace the swirls, stars, and moon with a needle tool so I had a template to go off of as I laid out my clay. I then brushed blue pearl ex powder to give the clay a shimmery surface as I don’t cover it entirely with the “paint” (and the background does show through between the pieces).

Step 2: Add your stars/moon

Since the rest of the clay wraps around the stars, I added these to my base first so I could work the clay into them (plus I forgot to stop and add the star to the first one because I got so enveloped by placing the blues). You don’t need very big pieces of clay at all for something this size, just enough to flatten out in a disc.

You can also add your moon at this point too. Roll out a thick snake of clay, taper the ends so the middle is thicker, shape into a curve, flatten, and trim the excess!

Similarly for my reason of adding all of the stars first, I then took my lighter shade of yellow and began wrapping around my stars and moon for the paint that surrounds them. To make your paint, roll out your light yellow clay into a thin snake with rounded ends. Slice pieces of varying lengths to wrap a few layers around your star. I think it looks better if the clay ends don’t line up.

At this point I was experimenting and leaving some gap for the blue to show through, but later decided to place the light yellow pieces next to each other and right up against the stars.

Step 3: Work with your blues

The Starry Night has a noticeable lighter band that moves horizontally across the painting. I divided my shades of blue into a darker set and a lighter set, with a medium shade appearing in both sets to keep a common color moving all the way through. In this experiment, I only had three shades of blue: a dark blue, a medium blue, and a light blue.

These were enough to create that band, but for my final dragon, I decided to create more shades for my dark and light sets to add some more variety.

Like we did for the yellow, we’ll roll out snakes and cut various lengths. You’ll want to move in the same direction–from left to right–for the most part. I started at the top left corner with my dark and medium blue and alternated the two, moving down towards the edge of my outline. When I got to the light section, I switched my dark blue for the light blue and kept alternating between the light and medium blue.

I worked the light section for a little bit, then switched back to my dark section, moving back and forth to help fill in the gaps.

Step 4: Yellow border

Once my blues were completely laid out, I ran a yellow strip along the bottom of light and medium yellow pieces to create that yellow band above the city. I did this from edge to edge.

Step 5: Bake

After you’ve added all of your strips, your piece is ready to bake! Since mine was so thin, I baked mine for 20 minutes at 275 degrees Fahrenheit, but you’ll want to follow your package’s instructions.

Step 6: Glaze

Now that your piece is baked, it’s ready for glaze! While this is an optional step, it does help protect the pearl ex powders, as well as help bring out the color.

And that’s it! It is pretty tedious, as all of the bits of clay had to be rolled out, cut up, and placed, but overall it was a fun technique that I want to try with other patterns and colors!

And in case you haven’t seen it, here is the dragon this technique was applied to:

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!