Picture Jasper
Quartz & Crystal Family
Picture jasper is a scenic-looking form of jasper, an opaque, fine-grained silica-rich rock colored by mineral impurities. Flow patterns, sedimentary bands, dendrites, fractures, and later mineral staining can produce designs resembling hills, deserts, or trees.
Identity
- Material or variety
- Jasper
- Scientific or material identity
- Jasper (opaque microcrystalline quartz)
- Classification
- Rock or mixed mineral material
- Composition or formula
- SiO₂ with mineral inclusions
- Crystal system or structure
- Aggregate or composite structure
- Geological or manufacturing origin
- Can form in more than one geological environment, or combines several materials.
- Mohs hardness
- 6.5 to 7
- Specific gravity
- 2.58 to 2.91
Origins
Indonesia · UK · USA
Appearance & optical properties
opaque tan and brown jasper with landscape-like layered bands.
History & discovery
Picture jasper is a descriptive lapidary name, not a separate mineral species. Jasper itself takes its name from an ancient word for a spotted stone and has been carved since antiquity; named scenic materials include Biggs jasper from Oregon and Bruneau jasper from Idaho.
Uses & care
- Common uses
- Its landscape-like patterns are displayed in cabochons, beads, spheres, carvings, and polished slabs, with cutters orienting each piece to frame a natural scene.
- Handling and cleaning
- Wash with warm soapy water and a soft cloth or brush. Although jasper resists scratching well, protect polished pieces from hard blows, abrasive cleaners, steam, ultrasonic cleaning, and rapid temperature changes.
Jewellery
6 pieces of Picture Jasper jewellery. Learners earn each one in DigMyGem by learning words; until then it shows as a silhouette.
Desert Vista Brooch
Brooch
An imagined brooch whose stone already holds a landscape. Picture jasper is cut to show the sandy banding inside it like mesas and dunes.
Canyon Sunrise Pendant
Pendant
An imagined pendant cut across the stone's layers. Its stripes read as a canyon lit at dawn.
Painted Mesa Ring
Ring
An imagined ring that leaves a wide flat stone uncovered. The point is the picture inside it, not facets.
Meat-Shaped Stone
Jewel
A Qing dynasty carving of banded jasper shaped like a piece of Chinese braised pork, one of the Three Treasures of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The stone's natural bands form the layers of fat and meat.
Painted Desert Cuff
Bracelet
An imagined cuff set with a long slab of picture jasper whose tan and brown bands look like a landscape of desert hills under a pale sky.
Painted Canyon Casket
Jewel
An imagined gilt casket whose panels of picture jasper show natural landscapes of distant hills, as if painted in stone.