Aquarium Gravel Texture Art

After covering up the Garnet Gel in my last project, I decided to try to a similar texture with cheaper materials. I went to the pet store and got a bag of the smallest aquarium gravel I could find. Here's what I did.

Start with a piece of mat board. Apply a thick layer of white glue in a pattern of your choosing. Sprinkle fine acquariam gravel over the glue and gently push down on it to set it in the glue. After it dries, apply a thin coat of Golden Self Leveling Gel (or any white glue if you don't have gel) to set the gravel further and keep it from dropping out of the glue layer. To give the areas without any gravel some texture, apply a layer of Golden Soft Gel (Matte) with your fingers, like finger painting. Click on the picture below to see the texture created by the Soft Gel.

Paint it, rocks and all, with black acrylic paint. (I didn't paint the hot pink rocks before adding Opals and wished I had.)

Paint glue on places that you want to put Opals. Sprinkle Opals on the wet glue and heat with heat gun until Opals melt. Add pinches of other Opal colors. Spray black areas with interference Radiant Rains.

Unfortunately, these pictures don't begin to pick up the richness of the interference colors. Here are some closeups of the final project. Click on the pictures to see the detail.