Jade Inro

I'd seen an example in the gallery of one of my polymer how-to books and later on many an example on the internet and I thought those inro type boxes looked pretty cool. So I wanted to make one myself.

This is not the first attempt. That one rather failed because I had to figure out the how-to all by myself. But I actually learned from my mistakes plus I found some general box-making tips in that same book, so attempt nr. 2 went very well.

And here it is. So the "jade" is made of clay (1 part dark green to 16 parts transparant white plus some black crumbs here and there) and the decorations on the inro and netsuke I made using a texture mat and some sap green patina after baking. The Chinese character (it's a Japanese object but Chinese style, it's called artistic lisence ) I looked up on the internet. I decided to make this box for my friend and she's a doctor so I searched for a character that would mean that and found this one (simplified style, not traditional, and it's kinda generic, it also means medicin, medicinal, to cure, to treat. I felt it was fitting and the character looked nice).

All in all I'm pretty pleased with it. I'm definitely making another one like it (but with a character more befitting to me) and after that other ones with different looks and perhaps even sizes (this one fits in the palm of your hand and can still be worn around the neck but inros the size of hip flasks can be done as well, which means lots of surface that can be decorated ).