Nightmare Before Christmas Pendant

It’s never too late for Nightmare Before Christmas, am I right? I will get random ideas just as I’m about to fall asleep. Usually I forget them by the time I wake up, but this one popped back into my head later that day, so yay! Last year, I “dressed up” as Sally for Halloween. I did more of an inspired look because I found leggings that reminded me of her.

I will probably wear this to work again this year, minus the make up, and I thought it’d be fun to have a pendant to pull the look together. I wanted to share this process with you so that you could make one for yourself if you’d like! This could be done with any shape, but a domed heart is what stuck in my head, and I thought it worked really well with the Jack/Sally pairing. A round pendant would be pretty too!

Supplies:

• Aluminum foil
• Polymer clay (doesn’t matter what color)
• Roller/pasta machine
• TLS
• Exacto knife
• Eye pin or wire/wire cutters/needle nose plier
• Sand paper (see my sanding clay tutorial for more information—optional)
• Acrylic paint in black, white, teal, yellow, and magenta (you can mix the last 3 colors too if that works better)
• Some kind of paint palette or surface to mix paint on, if needed
• 2 paint brushes—one for painting blocks of color, and a smaller one for detailing
• Water (not shown)
• Glaze (not shown)

Step 1: Make your armature

To help make this pendant be a little lighter and easier to wear, particularly because I’m choosing to do a more rounded, 3D shape, I want to create a foil center. If you were doing a flat pendant, this wouldn’t be necessary and would probably just make things more difficult. Taking the foil, make a ball of it in the shape your final pendant will be. This should be smaller than your desired finish size since we will still need to wrap clay around it.

Step 2: Prepare your clay/foil

Roll your conditioned clay out flat. You will want it to be a little thicker, say 1/4″, so that you have enough clay to fill in the uneven surface of your foil without it showing through. Note: Since we will be painting our Jack and Sally patterns, it does not matter what color your clay is. This makes it a great project to use up scrap clay! This part is optional, but you may also choose to spread a thin layer of TLS on your foil armature in order to help adhere the clay to it.

Step 3: Wrap your foil

Now it’s time to make our pendant base. Place your foil in the middle of the clay so you have lots of wiggle room around the armature. Then start bringing your clay up along the sides of your pendant, smoothing it down as much as possible as you move up.

You should be noticing that your clay is bunching in the middle. Keep smoothing the clay against the foil until you’re almost to the middle where all the seams will meet. To make it a little easier to work with, I like to trim off everything but 1/2″ or so at this point.

This allows for you see where you will have clay that sticks up from the foil, and these are the places you can start trimming down. I like to work around the pendant, trimming and smoothing in small sections, until all of the excess clay is cut away.

Step 4: Flatten the back

Decide which side you like best, and with that side facing up, gently push it down against your work surface. This will flatten the part that will be against your skin, so it will help the pendant sit a little better.

Step 5: Add your finding

If you have a preferred method or finding you’d like to use for your jewelry-making purposes, feel free to incorporate that! I am using a wire I cut and shaped into a loop.

Depending on if you’re going to string the pendant directly onto your necklace or use an o ring to connect the two, that will determine which direction you’ll want your loop to face. I’ll be stringing mine directly into the loop, so I want mine to be perpendicular. Cover the part of the wire that will insert into your pendant in TLS to help secure it when it bakes.

Step 6: Bake

Now you’re ready to bake your pendant! This should go into the oven heated according to your clay’s optimal heat. I bake mine for 30 minutes at 275 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step 7: Sanding (optional)

If you want to smooth out your pendant, you can sand it once it’s cooled. I recently created a tutorial showing how I sand my polymer clay pieces, so you can refer to that for help! You will be painting over it, so depending on how you paint and how many layers you need, the texture underneath may get completely covered up anyway, so that’s why this step is optional.

Step 8: Give it a base coat

Just to help make your other colors stand out nice and brightly at the end, I gave my pendant a 4 coats of white paint. This was the equivalent to priming my piece. You probably don’t need to do so many coats, but because it was nice and opaque, I only needed a couple of coats of my other colors. Here’s what it looked like once it was primed:

Step 9: Mix up your paint

It’s time for the fun part! If you have paint in the colors you’d like to use, then this part is a lot easier for you! I tend to paint Sally’s colors much more vibrantly than they are in the movie, just because I love the stark contrast between them and Jack’s black and white palette. This is completely up to you!

 

Mixing is very intuitive and experimental, and I don’t ever have a ratio of colors I use when mixing (including with clay), so I can’t tell you what exactly to use to get the perfect color, but I can give you an idea of what I used to make mine! Here are all the paints I used:

 

 

I had a teal color that I really liked already, so I didn’t mix up a teal. You would want to do this with green and blue paint and be a little heavier on the blue. Mix in white to create a lighter shade if it’s too dark for your preferences!

 

For the yellow, mine was too bright, so I mixed in a little red. A little red goes a lonnnnng way, so mix in a very small amount at a time and work toward your ideal color as it’s easy to fly past golden yellow and straight to an orange color.

 

 

For the magenta, I started with my bright pink (it’s what I had on hand) and mixed in red to bring it back. I also added purple. I would definitely say the majority of the paint was pink, and then I mixed in the other two in small amounts until I was happy, using more red than purple.

 

 

Note: I like to mix my colors up one at a time so I can increase their shelf life. For example, since I only had to mix up the magenta and yellow, I started with my magenta paint and worked on the parts of Sally’s side that I wanted magenta. While you’re waiting for the paint to dry, you can wrap your palette with a layer of plastic wrap and then a layer of aluminum foil to help keep it from drying out as fast. When I wrapped it this way, my paint was still usable the next day!

 

Step 10: Paint

If you’re good at eyeballing your patterns, feel free to get started painting, but I like to at least pencil in my sections before I start Sally’s pattern. I basically just drew lines to break the heart half into sections. I wanted to have one of each of the colors represented, so I have 4 sections. Here’s a mock up of what I prepared beforehand just to get an idea of what I wanted:

Start with your background colors: white for Jack’s side, and then the blocks of color you’re using for Sally’s pattern. I like to do several coats so that it’s nice and opaque.

If you want to add a patch or two to Sally’s side, now is also the time to do it!

Now all that’s left is to add the black details and do touch ups! You can lay down stripes on Jack’s side, and then the stripes, dots, swirls, and stitches on Sally’s side.

Step 11: Glaze

When you’re satisfied with the way your heart looks, it’s time to glaze! This will help protect your pendant, otherwise your paint may chip off, and that would be sad 🙁

And it’s done!