What could be better than the gift of dragon eyes? Using a round glass dome tile cabochon and matching sized pendant you can quickly and easily make some pretty cool dragon eye jewelry. With Amazon Prime shipping this is a great do-it-yourself gift idea to give your children, or to help your children create a cool gift for someone else in time for the holidays.
My kids, 10 and 12 at the time, and I created these for their mother for Mother’s Day. It was a fun and creative family project with a satisfying sense of accomplishment. In addition to the cabochon and pendant you’ll need paint, detail paint brushes, and some superglue. That’s really it. I imagine most any paint would work, but we used Folk Art acrylic paints from an earlier project. Black is a must for pupils, but also get a good variety of colors, and some metallics are an excellent choice. We used paint brushes from our miniatures painting, and whatever superglue I had lying around.
The process is simple. You paint the back of the glass cabochon, starting with the top layer as seen from the other side. First the pupil, then various layers of iris coloring including lines, speckles, and such, and ending with whatever background color you want. The time consuming part is waiting for each layer to dry. This process is fun and creative and if you end up not liking the result, just clean it off and try again. once finished, you just glue the eye into the pendent. My favorite result was probably the easiest. First paint a pupil, then splotch on a metallic keeping it pretty translucent, and ending with a black background. The process created the gold eye at the top of this post.
We made both 30mm pendants as well as 14mm pendants. There are many size and pendant style options on Amazon. I recommend buying sets of pendants with cabochons just to be sure you are getting compatible sizes.
If you’re feeling a little bit more ambitious and have some time, you can instead make dragon eye themed books. Last year I used blank books, this cabochon eye technique, and egg shells for scales to create dragon-themed books for my kids for Christmas gifts. This is again a pretty simple, but more time consuming process, with very satisfying results, sure to please.
The process and materials required for the dragon books, as well as the links to the YouTube videos where I learned the dragon scale and dragon eye techniques can be found in my earlier post, “Poaching Dragons on Christmas.”
