Polymer clay presents so many ways to use just the clay itself (without paint etc) to create complex color blends and designs.   

The Mokume-gane technique involves (usually very thin) layers of clay stacked, and impressed with deep stamps, texture sheets or household objects such as knitting needles, pen tops, and various hardware.  (The name is based on an ancient metal technique which involves patterns created by cutting into thin layered metal sheets)

Once impressions are made, very think slivers can be removed with a flexible blade, so you can use the sheet of pattern that remains as well as the slivers you’ve removed.

For the pieces below, I made impressions with the back of a blade, a square pen cap and a skewer.  I removed complete slices with a wide peeler bought for Dam Cormier’s “Single Slice Mokume-gane” class, although I’ve found that a vegetable peeler works just as well, but you are limited by the width.

The design can be changed further by placing the thin patterned sheet onto a sheet of clay and rolling it to stretch it out, as I did for the second pair of earrings.

Each layer of color is very thin, so you’ll notice that some blend together giving a larger range of shades than you start with.  My starting colours were two shades of green, mustard yellow, orange (all mixed from the packet colours), black and white.