Paper Landscape Silhouette Earrings

This instructable shows you how to make a pair of lovely layered landscape earrings from paper! They're simple to make, but still elegant with a touch of gold on the sides. Each layer of the abstract landscape silhouette is subtly separated to give some depth. The two designs pictured above show ocean waves and a mountain scene, but feel free to get creative and design your own.

For this project, you'll need:

• Lots of different colors of cardstock. I would pick a heavier paper weight, that can withstand glue without swelling. If you're going for the ombre look pictured above, luckily cardstock is often sold in packs with coordinated color schemes.
• Glue
• Gold colored kidney ear wires, or your favorite type of earring finding
• Gold paint
• Scissors, or an exacto blade
• Paintbrush
• Pliers
• Needle tool

Pick five colors of cardstock that you want to use for your earrings and cut a long rectangular strip for each color. The strips pictured above are about 1"x0.25". You'll also want to cut at least two extra strips of any color to use as filler material in between each layer of your landscape. If you choose to use an exacto blade, try using a ruler to get straight edges and sharp corners.

The neater that you can cut these strips, the better! Once you stack the strips together, uneven edges will become more pronounced. One thing you can do is to stack all of the strips together and trim edges that stick out to make sure you get clean sides.

Put aside the filler rectangle strips and use a pencil to outline the shape for your landscape elements on the five rectangles of your chosen color. Pictured above, I going for a mountain scene, so I've drawn some abstract mountains on each layer in decreasing height.

Use your scissors or exacto blade to cut the outlines that you have just drawn. Again, ignore the filler rectangles for now.

You can stack these cut out pieces together and preview what the final product will look like. Make sure you're happy with the result before you move on! Now is the time while you can still trim pieces until you're satisfied.

Using the scrap rectangles that you've been saving, cut four pieces of filler material to sit in between each layer of your landscape. Be sure to make the each piece short enough, such that it is not visible behind the landscape element that will be in front of it.

Use glue to hold each piece of your landscape together. Start with the topmost element of your scene, add a filler rectangle, continue with the next largest landscape element, and so forth. The result of this step is pictured above.

I would suggest that you glue a few pieces of paper together at a time and give it some time to dry instead of gluing the whole stack of segments together at once. The pieces might slip around while the glue is still wet, and it'll be more manageable if you work with well held together pieces.

Gently brush some gold paint onto the sides of your assembled landscape for an elegant touch. Be careful not to brush too hard, otherwise paint may get onto the front of your piece.

Use your needle tool (or simply a needle) to add a hole near the top of your landscape piece.

Slip your piece onto the kidney ear wire as shown.

Notice how we've put the design on the wire with the back of the artwork on top. When you slip your landscape piece around the wire, the front of the design will be facing forward.

You're done! I hope you enjoyed this instructable; if you liked it, please consider voting for it in the papercrafts contest. Let me know what you think, and feel free to post pictures if you gave it a shot. I'd love to see how yours comes out!