This recipe is not about exact colours and measurements, feel free to experiment!

For this particular shade of turquoise I've used:

• 1 part Premo Turquoise to ½ part Premo white and ½ part Premo green.
  
• Black acrylic paint.
  
• Burnt Umber acrylic paint.
  
• Well sifted black earth or potting soil, or peat, whatever!
  

Blend your three colours together very well. You can also use a turquoise straight out of the ackage, I really like the Premo turquoise left plain.

Separate you fully mixed lump of clay into 3 approximately equal parts, let cool down for a good 10 minutes before moving onto the next step, you can even put it in the fridge to make sure it's really cold!

Picking up one part at a time, carefully pull off crumbs of clay, try and keep these rough and randomly shaped and sized...you *can* chop the clay if you need to but it makes for a less natural random pattern in my opinion. When your lump starts pulling and getting too soft lay it down and let it cool, move onto another piece...try different methods off pulling, breaking, and rubbing the clay to get these little pieces off, you'll need a lot of little pieces!

Now it's time to get REALLY messy! Grab your paints, squeeze on a good blob of each colour, about 50/50 brown/black...get your fingers in there and toss the pieces with the wet paint, I do this on a big sheet of waxed paper. Now, sprinkle on a little of the sifted soil, not too much or the pieces wont stick! But enough so there's some soil sticking to every piece.

Now, we're going to let this dry, really dry! We don't want to blend the paint into the clay.So spread out your clay as much as possible and leave it alone for an hour or more.When pieces are dry to the touch gather them together and move to another location, I'll Work on a tile. For the cane, it's simple! Press your pieces (don't be afraid!! SQUASH em in there!) in to a log, I prefer to do a square cane for this...press really well, you. Don't want the piece crumbling when it's cured. Once your cane is formed let sit for a minute and slice. You can even reduce this cane without losing detail, I've made tiny ¼ Inch turquoise earrings.

Apply your finished cane slices to whatever your heart desires! Cure well, if you have cracks use a stiff brush or toothbrush and more of your brown/black paint mix to push into all the little cracks, remove excess paint with a damp papertowel and cure again for about 10 minutes, wet sand and buff!

See my gallery for some more of my finished turquoise projects.