About Us
Learn More About Us
I, Ujjwal Agrawal a college dropout decided to expand his family business and made the dendritic agates available easily for every small business in the world by starting the Instagram page @godsownpaintings in 2016. In order to get them more accessible for everyone we created this website so it can help people shop them with more convenience. Godsownpaintings provides the best quality and extraordinary agates at the most reasonable price and is the largest producer of dendritic agates which are sourced ethically by our miners and handcrafted by the skilled lapidary artist. All the stone available here are 100% natural inclusions of minerals on agate surfaces.
Geology: Found at the edges of the famed Deccan Traps of India, the largest volcanic flood basalt region in the world, Indian Dendritic agates were formed by an intriguing set of geological co-incidences coinciding with the mysterious K-T mass extinctions around 60-80 million years back at the end of the Cretaceous period and around the advent of the Tertiary period in geological history. This period occurrences in the Deccan traps have often also been linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Most of the soil (95%) in this region consists of the tholeiitic basalts and rest being other minor but related occurrences. Chemically these agates are quartz nodules with atypical banding and occasional druzy hearts with a hardness of around 7 on the Moh's scale. Somenodules have yellow skins though that is again not a typical feature. The impressions though are still a scientific debate though most opinions point to the purely inorganic depositions of iron, magnesium and tin ions while a smaller school of thought believes that these were organic material replaced by ion exchange process over millions of years by inorganic metal salts and agatized. There are two primary occurrences of Indian Dendritic agates spread over an area of about 50 kms radius in West Central India. The primary occurrence is of secondary river bed deposits in one of the tributaries of the Mighty Narmada river that has been weathered down by water and is a regenerating source after the annual post monsoon floods and is often associated with the transparent and morefinely imprinted stones while the second inland source is associated with the translucent stones which are again sub characterized according to the regional peculiarities and are mined from the grey green volcanic ash beds at the depths of 40-85 feet. While the river bed agates have mostly black, brown and rarely green dendrites on a glassy surface, the inland agates display a variety of grounds and imprints ranging from while, yellow, grey grounds and imprints in almost every color ranging from the common black and browns to red and the extremely rare yellows and purples.
Mining / Gathering: The river bed mining takes place in two major phases every year, the first being in last of February till March when the river bed is dry and cucumbers and other deep rooting vines are planted in the river bed, these fast growing vines mature in a month and the deep and fast growing roots churn the soft alluvium resulting in many nodules coming to the top and are easily collected for sorting by experienced sorters. The second and most important phase of gathering takes place post the annual monsoon floods around the end of June till around September -October when the flood waters weather and break the boulders and the nodules come to the surface after the flood waters recede. Though easy it may sound, its not a child'splay as only one in 100 nodules bear a dendrite which often occurs deep in the heart of the stone perpendicular to the bandings and sometimes on the gravely quartz matrix. The dark, translucent yellow and black skins of the nodules make it very difficult to figure out what is inside the stone. The collected nodules are then very slowly and painstakingly sorted for any evidence of a dendrite, small chips and cracks are looked for and into, small cracks made on the surface and the possible direction of the cleavage is determined to break the stone accordingly. This method though still is not error free and many times a good dendrite and my heart gets broken with a careless hammer stroke. The cracked nodules are then dipped in water and held against the sunlight took for thedeceptive signs of dendrites and it takes years and years of experience to be able to figure out the secrets in the heart of the stone. Each mineral being responsible for a different color Iron-oxide = orange, rust, red or yellow. Manganese-oxide = blues, blacks or purples. Carnotite (a compound of uranium) = brilliant oranges and bright yellows. chromium = soft green cinnabar = true rose or baby-pink chlorite = deep green
Chipping: The crafts person has to work with a hammer which is used to break the stone. When the top covering of the stone is chipped away, if it shows clear parallel markings the stone is kept for further use. Further chipping may reveal dendritic spots. Slicing: Cutting is done near the impression on those stones which have dendrites in deep position. The stone is then sliced. Often blotchy dendrites appear which are of poor quality and hence are rejected. Only the fine fan like dendrites are further processed. A spring steel wire of 23 gauge is wrapped with a 5 feet long wood bow hanging 500 grams weight of stone on one side and alumina or silicon carbide powder is mixed with water and applied on the stone and the stone is rubbed. The wire cutting the stone near thedendrites divides the stone into two parts. The first part is that part in which the dendrites gets revealed. The second part is useless. Designing: Then carefully a design is drawn on the stone with a pencil so that the emerging dendrites is showcased in the most effective manner. Chipping Again: Excess stone outside the pencilled design is carefully chipped away by cutting with a wire or breaking bit by bit with a wrench. Grinding: Grinding is done using the machine. On a iron plate the same alumina or silicon carbide powder which we had used in cutting stone with wire, is applied on the agate and it is rubbed on the edges. Grindstone can be either iron or silicon carbide grinder. Both the surfaces andedges are smoothed with the help of fine powder. Finally in place of plaster a woollen cloth wrapped on a round wood is used to polish that gem. Sanding: The stone is then mounted on a small lapping machine. During Lapping the stone is ground or rubbed with an abrasive material. The commonly used abrasive in dendritic agate is silicon carbide. This process is repeated number times each time with a fine grade of abrasive. Polishing: The stone is polished with Red oxide, Tin Oxide and Chromium Oxide.
Clients
Projects
Hours Of Support
Workers