Making a hot glue jewel

Melisandre needs a giant jewel for her necklace. The best way of making the jewel would probably be to cast it in resin or something, but I have never done anything like that and I hoped that there was an easier way of creating big jewels. I stumbled upon a mention of making cosplay jewels out of hot glue, and I decided to try it.

This is how I made my jewel. The jewel for Melisandre is an uneven quite organic shape, I do not know how well this method works if you want to use a mold or have it look exactly as something.

Start with pouring the paint that you want to use for your jewel in a disposable container that can stand heat. If you want to you can of course mix colours. In this tutorial you might notice that the jewel changes colour, I will come back to how the choice of paint affects the result at the end.

Cut the hot clue sticks into smaller pieces. For Melisandres jewel I used 1-2 glue sticks.

Heat the glue with a heatgun until it melts, and mix it with the paint. I won't be a runny consistency, but there shouldn't be any lumps of glue.

Pour the blob of glue until a sheet of alumium foil.

You can now use some kind of tool to smooth it out and give the general shape that you want it to be. Make it bigger than it should be, since you are going to trim it down later.

Let the coloured layer cool down and then add a layer of clear glue on top of the jewel.

This is what it looks like when it has cooled down. The clear glue isn't very clear, but rather milky.

Start cutting the jewel into the final shape with a sharp knife. Then start cutting away the top layer of clear clue. The cuts will give the jewel a more faceted surface and make it look more like a jewel than just a blob.

When you are satisfied with the shape of the jewel, heat up the surface again to remove any small hairs of glue or ugly cut marks. Do this quickly, you don't want to destroy the facets that you have just created. When you are finished you can put a clear coat of gloss lacquer on top.

These are the four jewel that I have made, and this is where the choice of colour affects the outcome. The two jewels to the right aren't finished. I used glass paint for them, thinking that it would give the a nice transparent look. The glass paint hasn't bonded with the glue though. When the jewels cooled down they started to separate, leaving clear blobs of glue with wet paint between them.

For the two left jewels I use common acrylic paint. The acrylic made the glue-blob really sticky, compared to the glass paint, so it was trickier to work with but the process of cutting them were so much easier since they behaved like a soft plastic.

As for colour choice, well I failed there. I only had a winered paint, and it's too light and blue. When I mixed it with black it didn't get a lot darker but rather it turned purple, as can be seen with the leftmost jewel. The most red jewel is made with wine red, but I've added in a bit of copper to darken it and a tiny, tiny amount of black.

I will use the most red jewel for NärCon, but I will probably buy some darker red paint and redo the jewel for Comic-Con.