Before starting work on my polymer clay faux granite countertop, I decided to add a layer of 1/32″ balsa underneath. This solved several problems, but most importantly it would allow the clay rolled out at the thickest setting of my pasta machine to lie flush with the adjacent 1/8″ balsa countertop.
Unfortunately, I had already glued in the horizontal strip along the top edge before deciding to add the 1/32″ balsa. It would have looked better if the horizontal strip had covered the seam, but with the granite countertop overhang, I don’t think it will be too noticeable.
Creating the template for the countertop was tricky, since one of the corners of the counter is not a perfect right angle—something must have slipped while gluing those miter joints. (This imperfection especially bothers me because the base does have perfect right angles, and the whole thing looks a little bit off when viewed from below. Luckily, no one will see it from that vantage point.)
Once I had the L-shape measured to size, I started experimenting with the faux granite. My technique was to simply mince several colors as finely as possible, gently mix them together, and roll it flat. I wanted the granite to be primarily brown and black, so I did some testing to see which colors worked best. Thinking that the mica content of metallic/pearl clay would give a nice effect, my first tests used Premo graphite pearl as the base color. However, it had too much of a silver hue, so I ended up using plain black instead. I also experimented with some color mixing, blending various combinations of Premo copper, bronze, gray granite, burnt umber, raw sienna, and rhino gray, as well as some Sculpey III hazelnut. While some of the mixes looked great on their own, I didn’t care much for how the non-metallic colors looked when minced and mixed all together. Therefore, Premo black, gray granite, and bronze became my base colors, with some of the experimental bits tossed in for variety.
Here is the veneer rolled out.
After trimming the veneer to size, I beveled the edges slightly for a more refined look. In the glare of the light, some tiny nicks are visible. These were unavoidable and practically impossible to smooth out entirely, but sanding and polishing will eliminate most of these imperfections.
Normally, I bake my clay pieces on a 6×6″ ceramic tile, but I clearly needed something bigger for this project. You’d think it would be easy to find a large, smooth, glazed ceramic tile, but we had no luck at any of the local hardware stores. (And I learned the hard way that product descriptions in online stores can be misleading: one large ceramic tile was listed as smooth and glazed, but it actually had a very bumpy texture.) So I ended up ordering two panes of borosilicate glass, just large enough to fit this piece. I sandwiched the clay between the glass in order to prevent warping, and to prevent shiny spots I layered sheets of paper between the clay and the glass.
After baking, I sanded the piece using wet/dry sandpaper and then buffed it using a set of polishing cloths from Fire Mountain Gems. Finally, I applied a coating of Renaissance Wax to bring out the shine.
The last step was to glue the countertop in place. Here is the final result.
I measured everything very carefully so that it would fit perfectly next to the baseboard and trim.
