Mockingjay Pendant

Inspired by the amazing Hunger Games series, I decided to make this pendant. To be honest, it's a project I had planned for quite a while now (approximately three years). However, I originally planned to make a wirework mockingjay pendant. Since I've posted quite a few wire work projects lately and have quite a big wire project coming up, I decided it was time to change things around a bit and make it a totally different way. I got a package of shrink plastic last year and I had already seen amazing stuff being created with it, so I decided to give it a shot!

So, you may be wondering, isn't the pin shown in the movies gold ? And yes, yes it is. But this pendant is my own, maybe slightly unique, vision of the mocking jay : ) I hope you'll like it!

To make your own Mockinjay pendant, you will need:

- shrink plastic

- (acrylic) paint

- image of a mockingjay pin, I used a small fineliner drawing

- Indian ink

- ink pen

- scissors

- brushes

- exacto knife

- string

Let me tell you something: shrink plastic shrinks in size after heating it. That means that the drawing you make on the plastic needs to be quite a bit bigger than you want your pendant to be. According to the plastic I used, it would shrink to about a third of the original size.

To make your drawing, you could follow the steps I took, or you could just print a picture on the right size and trace that immediately : ).

To draw the mocking jay:

Start with the head. Add the stomach outline next and let that line continue into the tail. Next line is the arch of the back, start with the neck and draw until you're about halfway above the stomach outline. This is where the back is interrupted by the wing. Try to sketch the first line of the wing the way you think it should look. Add the first line of the second wing and let the back arch continue just a bit past the first wing to make it into a part of the tail.

Fill the drawing up with the second wing line and the corner between the two tail ends. After that your bird is finished and it's time to add a circle! For positioning the circle: the bird's center of gravity, its stomach, is in the middle of the circle. Add a second, parallel circle inside the first one. Then, it's just a case of drawing the arrow and your drawing is completed!

This is where the ink and the ink pen come in: Indian ink is a horrible thing to get out of clothes and stuff, but with a bit of water it comes off of smooth surfaces perfectly fine and easy, while it does dry completely.

Place the plastic on the drawing/image you made/printed and trace it using the ink. You don't need to trace all the lines, only the outlines you need to cut out.

Use your scissors to cut out the outer parts of the plastic, basically all parts that can be reached without trouble. For the small bits, like the plastic around the arrow point, it's easier to move on to next step.

Score the inner outlines of the drawing using an exacto knife. You don't need to cut them completely through yet. Once all the lines are traced, simply take a wet cloth and wipe off the ink.

All that's left now is tracing your scored lines a few times with your exacto knife, until you actually cut through the plastic. Be sure to work on a cutting board for this step, you don't want to damage anything!

This step depends a bit on the instructions your shrink plastic gives. Or maybe it doesn't, since those did not work for me.

According to the instructions, I preheated the oven to 180 degrees Celcius and placed the plastic inside of it on top of a piece of aluminum foil. They said the plastic would curl up and then lay flat again. Unfortunately, the first bit worked. However, after curling up, nothing happened anymore. I tried it again, nothing. After that I used a hot air gun on the warped piece of plastic, luckily that seemed to work, since I was eventually left with the result shown in last picture. The arrow point had already broken off though.

However, when I tried this a second time and immediately used the hot air gun, it didn't really work the way I wanted it to either, the pendant got too hot and parts started melting together.

Feel free to use whatever colour you want!

I decided I didn't want to go for the traditional gold look, mainly because I didn't have gold paint, but silver wasn't really working for me either. So, I turned it into my very own version of a mocking jay. I added a bit of blue to the bird, because I think it looks nice! :)

To make the colour better visible after just one layer, a base coat can be quite useful. If you don't feel like waiting for it to dry, I wiped it off after a few minutes and just went with the almost transparent white that was left, it did make a difference, you can see the effect it has in step 11.

If you're painting your pendant one colour, you can paint the entire thing at once. If you want your bird to have a different colour than the background, start by painting the bird.

I used small, stripey motions to create a feather feeling/look, but you could also go with just a single direction of applying paint, or even simply airbrushing it.

So, as described in step 7, I ended up with two pendants. Thanks to that, I could make this small comparison: the first and the third picture are of the pendant without a base coat, picture two and four show the results of using a very light base coat.

Even though there's only an extremely thin layer of base coat on there, the paint is much more opaque than when not using a base coat.

To add that lovely blue accent to the pendant:

Using the same motion, paint blue stripes on top of the brown paint. There's no need to use multiple shades of blue, you can already get a lot of variation with the thickness of the paint and with the colour that's underneath it.

To complete the pendant, paint the outer circle and the arrow. The silver paint I used needed three layers to show up the way I wanted it to, just be sure to wait until the previous layer has dried completely .

Cut off a piece of string that's long enough to fit over your head. Knot the ends together and add the part where you want your pendant to dangle through the space between both wings of your mocking jay. Insert the knot through the loop that's not on the other side and pull it tight.

And that's it! I hope you liked this instructable, if you did I'd love to know and maybe will give it a shot yourself :)