Mon Mothma jewellery pieces

Tonight I started on the jewellery pieces for Mon Mothma. A first look at a reference picture and reading the Rebel Legion standards made them look fairly straight forward.

A necklace consisting of two dull gray twisted cords, with a round, silver pendant, detailed as it appears in the movie, suspended from two smaller, twisted cords in the center. The necklace should be attached at each shoulder and end with the gray cord wrapped around a small, domed object, such as a button, with single strand of the large gray cord around the back of the collar.

I would do the main pendant as a solid piece and then somehow attach the cords to is, and the round things at the shoulders could be anything dome-like. All painted silver.

Then I got hold of some reference pictures in higher resolutions and started to realize that there's a lot of things that are not correct in that description.

 The main thing is that the pendant is not silver, and it's not solid. The silver appearance comes from the fact that the silver cord is twisted through the pendant. Where the silver meets the "branches" of the tree or twig or whatever it is, there is a clear contrast. Instead the colour of the pendant blends with one of the light gold cords.

As for the colour of the shoulder pieces, well that's harder. If you see the grey thinner cord coming up towards the piece there is once again a difference in colour between them. The dome looks to be closer to the wider cords in colour, but it might also be that they are being reflected back since the dome is quite shiny.

This detailed photo also shows that the thinner cord goes up and circle te top of the dome, and that the dome has a small red bead on top of it.

With that information I started on making the pendant.

I measured out a ring and heated a strip of worbla with a heatgun until it was soft. I pressed the strip together to give it a twisted look and attached the ends to each other.

I then put on the center bar. As you can see the outer ring got distorted by the heat from the heatgun when I attached the center, but that's easy to fix when all the pieces have been attached.

I then attached two strips to form the arms/twigs or whatever they are. I looked at it and was not happy with the result. It felt too big, and the arms were too narrow. So I started over and redid it all but smaller.

This time I was much mor happy with the pendant, so I just let it cool down while I formed the shoulder domes and beads in fimo clay.

Then came the issue on what paint to use. I feel as if it's some kind of light gold or brass colour, but definitely not silver or dark gold. I looked in my paint collection and in the end I used metallic gold, mixed with some off white paint. To give it both a more grey colour and more sheen I finished them off with a transparent silver paint. The beads were painted with a nail varnish.

Now I'm off to the Rebel Legion boards to argue that the jewellery is not silver...