Many of our readers are already familiar with Marina Andrei’s artwork. Her detailed tutorials published in Society and in the Polymer Week Magazine have been a source of inspiration for countless artists from all over the world. Her clean and precise style of shaping the pieces and the way she assembles her necklaces are easily recognizable.
Did you know that Marina names every piece of jewelry she creates? Her latest necklace, called “Spacecraft” has an outworldly allure and seems to be made for a sci-fi movie character.
We asked Marina to tell us the tale of how this necklace was created. We were curious about the journey from the first idea to the finished piece. Marina is not only a talented artist, but also a skilled storyteller! She started the story relating that she started the Spacecraft necklace with a color palette in mind: cool, metallic colors - blues, grays, white and black. She chose a steel-like shade, with pearl white and black. “Brr… way too cool,” she thought. She needed a contrasting color to enhance the metallics, so she decided to add a touch of a strong, vivid, orange red. “I had the Ferrari red in my mind,” she says, “and after several tries, I got the recipe for something similar.”
Thinking of stelar spaceships with pointed antennas, Marina started to search for an abstract texture in her box. “I found the Texture Stamp no. 6 by Lucy Struncova, which I had no chance to use yet for my creations. It gave me the inkling of a bunch of sticks or needles. Did I say needles? Ok, icicles. Ice is cold and so was my color palette. Perfect!” The texture is quite shallow so Marina made a stack of very thin sheets of clay for the mokume gane. She loved the result!
The most difficult part was to find a texture for the lower part of the pendant. She knew she wanted a texture, but something light, shallow and repetitive, that didn't compete with the mokume pattern that was definitely the main element. She found a piece of texture that she received as a bonus gift with a polymer clay order. “I would call it a piece of... something,” she says. “Maybe it was an ex plastic table individual cover to put under the plates. Who knows?” Many creative people use all kinds of weird stuff they find in their household for texturing polymer clay. “I matched the surface of the texture with the rest of the pendant by using metallic Pan pastels. And this is how I found that if you combine silver with blue pastels you get a nice steel color.”
Marina’s necklace is absolutely stunning. A lover of textures and metallic clay, she approaches her projects from a craftsmanship and design perspective, with the objective of bringing her conceptual work to life through the jewelry she creates. And we love it!
