MrGreene
Well-Known Member
I've always loved the Tomb Raider series, and ever since the concept art for the new game came out a couple of years ago, this necklace stood out to me as something I absolutely had to make.
Little did I know at the time, a certain nerdy lady friend of mine happened to have the same feeling about the entire outfit, so as a surprise for her upcoming birthday, I decided to give her the perfect finishing touch.
I noticed that everyone else just used polymer clay or resin to make their necklaces, but where's the fun in that? I had a few diamond engraving/cutting bits for my Dremel laying around, so I decided to try my hand at semi-precious stone cutting.
A few notes: nephrite jade is around a 7 on the Mohs scale, so diamond bits are pretty much the only thing that will work.
After doing some quick maths and shoopin' together a 1:1 pattern from both concept art and in-game references, I traced it onto a slab of nephrite jade:
(sorry, not many progress photos)
Then, after countless hours of grinding, filing, grinding, sanding, filing, sanding, grinding, sanding, and a little more sanding, I ended up with this lil' guy:
I opted to use the smaller in-game size, since it's a bit more realistic. For scale:
After a few more hours of rounding out and wet sanding (oh God, the sanding...), it's starting to look a little more polished:
..and that's all for tonight. There's still some rounding and cleaning up left to do on the lines and one tiny mark to add in the center (by hand, of course, since I horribly bent my Dremel's flex shaft in an unfortunate buffing incident) but overall, I think it's coming together pretty well so far.
It will polish itself over the few thousand years I hope it will last
Little did I know at the time, a certain nerdy lady friend of mine happened to have the same feeling about the entire outfit, so as a surprise for her upcoming birthday, I decided to give her the perfect finishing touch.
I noticed that everyone else just used polymer clay or resin to make their necklaces, but where's the fun in that? I had a few diamond engraving/cutting bits for my Dremel laying around, so I decided to try my hand at semi-precious stone cutting.
A few notes: nephrite jade is around a 7 on the Mohs scale, so diamond bits are pretty much the only thing that will work.
After doing some quick maths and shoopin' together a 1:1 pattern from both concept art and in-game references, I traced it onto a slab of nephrite jade:
(sorry, not many progress photos)
Then, after countless hours of grinding, filing, grinding, sanding, filing, sanding, grinding, sanding, and a little more sanding, I ended up with this lil' guy:
I opted to use the smaller in-game size, since it's a bit more realistic. For scale:
After a few more hours of rounding out and wet sanding (oh God, the sanding...), it's starting to look a little more polished:
..and that's all for tonight. There's still some rounding and cleaning up left to do on the lines and one tiny mark to add in the center (by hand, of course, since I horribly bent my Dremel's flex shaft in an unfortunate buffing incident) but overall, I think it's coming together pretty well so far.
It will polish itself over the few thousand years I hope it will last
