Alien Ring for the Area 51 Raid

I designed an Area 51 ring from the Patrick Adair supplied subscription box and the ring was actually so out of this world that we're offering a finished version on the designs website as well. I've got a supplies company I post my own YouTube videos that show more in-depth tutorials on making rings. This month was a really fun ring as we had a really cool area 51 theme. 

I thought it would be a lot of fun to post and hopefully, you guys appreciate it too. We did a couple of like editing changes and things to make it better for you guys. Every single month we do a tutorial on the Patrick Adair supply's YouTube channel going over the subscription box for a new ring.

For the actual materials in the ring we started off with a black ceramic ring blank base and this was the perfect material for an alien-themed ring. The weight of it was incredibly lightweight and had a super glossy finish on it. It had an incredible amount of scratch resistance, so if you're looking for a material that seems like it's from another planet this black ceramic is perfect. 

For the inlay materials, we had two different colors of opal that looked great. We had some iridescent that shimmered and showed really cool colors. This added to the out-of-this-world effect and for a space-themed green, we had meteorite shavings. These looked wonderful and added a cool history to the ring. The meteorite was literally older than the earth itself so it added a lot of cool interesting stuff to the ring. This really fitted the theme.

As far as the powders, I took the green glow base and you can mix any of the pigments. It fit the alien theme well. I had two different pigments, the black and purple and went really subtle with both of them. I didn’t use a ton of purple and for the black that I actually mixed in a small enough amount that it was more of a charcoal color. 

For the first step, I had the color pigments and glow powders all sorted out. I mixed them all up in the vials. For the final step, I added meteorite shavings directly into the charcoal glow powder and the charcoal. I used as a base for the glow and for the purple I finessed in there. I only needed to add it to the charcoal for this instance. 

I then laid out the materials. The opal is what I focused on next and I didn’t do anything fancy for this. I just put a little dab of my CA glue and then continued all the way around the ring. I wanted to make sure that both opal colors had an opportunity to show up in the ring and that they were both extending out beyond the surface of the ring. This way they didn't get covered up. 

If you have any questions about CA glue, ring mandrels, tools, or any other materials I use, check out our Patrick supplies website, there is a link at the bottom of this. We have a great Amazon affiliate store setup with a lot of these products listed as our own product that we've developed specifically for ring making.

Once I had the inlay materials in place I went ahead and started working on some of the powders. I started with the purple and laid down a really thin layer of CA all around the entire diameter of the ring. I then sprinkled a really light layer of purple over the whole thing. It surrounded the opal in a kind of halo of purple. Anywhere else where we had the lower spots and there was no opal, the purple didn’t show.

We covered that with charcoal and that's what I went for with this ring. I wanted to give it a really weird eerie effect. For the next step, I combined things if you remember I added the meteorite shavings to the charcoal powder. So I went in and filled in any of the empty voids with my mixture. In the end, we had a ring that was mostly the solid charcoal color with the addition of the opal pieces sticking out. 

It had a cool halo effect from the purple and then I used a Dremel to slowly start grinding away the exterior of the ring. I wanted to keep going, so I replaced my Dremel bits as soon as they get worn out until I had to flush it with the rest of the black ceramic. A quick tip I have is if you're wanting to save some time once you've got it sanded down, you should flush with the rest of the ring as much as you can.

I noticed we had a little remnant piece of glue and it was a lot of work to go in and individually sand that away. It can really ruin your ring you can scratch it a lot if you're working with the softer material. It can also round over the bevels, so what I like to do is just take a razor blade and carefully try to scrape it all off. That works a lot better for me and saves me a lot of headache and time. It leaves no errors, dents or scratches to have to fix.

For the finishing steps, I had the inlay flush with the rest of the ring and went ahead and started using some of my sandpaper. I started off with a rougher grit of sandpaper, around 220. I spent a lot of extra time at this step and got rid of any of the deeper gouges or scratches that the Dremel left. From there you breeze your way through the higher sandpapers. In general, I tried to use about 4 different grits of sandpaper. After that, I stopped somewhere between about 1,200 and 2,000 grit on my sandpaper. 

I threw a polish on there and it was finished. The polish I used was super convenient the way it worked. It had polishing particles in it that broke down as I used it, so it started pretty rough and was able to get rid of any micro imperfections and little scratches. The polish itself broke down to finer particles and that gave it a better polish. This was a really great all-in-one polish that gave a super high shine. It left a fantastic finish and is actually a product we are working on getting available on the supplies website. 

The ring was finished and it looked really nice, you could notice all the meteorite shavings in there. It was super quick and easy. The purple was only appearing where the inlay materials were and it was a lot more subtle. The opal looked great and you could see how it shimmered in different lighting. I’d say it definitely fits the theme for sure it and looks great on the hand. 

I hope you have fun making these rings yourself if you're doing so. If you're a ring maker and you haven't joined our Facebook group I would really recommend you do so. It's a lot of fun as everyone just posts the projects they work on. I love seeing the subscription box rings every month and we get so many different ideas that people do. Everyone uses a lot of different techniques, so we are able to do really unique and fun stuff. I think it's a great community to be a part of, so be sure to join if you haven’t.

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