Finished pieces

Here are two finished pieces from my "All Bronze Must Go" weekend.

The tree in the owl piece was supposed to be etched into the background of the pendant. When the clay was still wet I used a needle tool to draw the tree and leaves. The plan was to patina the piece when it came out of the kiln so the lines in the tree would stand out. But they were too shallow and when the pendant shrunk in the kiln, they became too shallow to really differentiate well from the background. Next time I will make a thicker piece and use my linoleum carving set to carve the lines nice and deep. So, instead I covered over the lines with a polymer clay tree. Not the exact effect I was going for, but it came out well enough.