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I've got a long weekend off of work, so I thought I'd take some time
to record the various finishes I've tried on pieces to date. No
special theme just a chronicle of how I got it to look that way before
I forget any more of what I've done. Also, lessons learnt and opinions.
|
First, an object lesson in what not to do. This was supposed to have
been a sample piece, with Modern Options
blonde bronze paint. Just the paint on the left, and a gloss acrylic from
Aervoe on top. I was trying to get the
thing done in a hurry. I did the color coat, and gave it about an hour.
The paint was dry to the touch, but I knew I'd had trouble in the past with
masking tape pulling up the paint. This time, I used really low-tack tape
meant just for holding down drawings. A couple of brief tests showed no
problems, but either time alone, or time plus the solvents from the spray
gloss conspired to lift big chunks of the acrylic. The white areas on
the right are just highlights from the lamps, not peeled places.
|
Next is "Bronze B" from Sculpt Nouveau.
Ron Young is the artist there, and he has written what is apparently a
well respected book on the topic of patination: Contemporary Patination.
I don't have it myself, though, so no opinions there. On the basis of good
reviews, I ordered a small sample of this paint, and some green patina.
The paint is supposed to have the virtue that you can apply patina to it after
it's dry. The patina, in addition to chemical action, also has some oxide color
added. When I got my order, in addition to the paint and patina, I also got
a load of other stuff. Directions, a catalog, and a couple of samples. Very
nice. Unfortunately, I have to say that I was pretty disappointed in the patina.
The paint was fine. The metal flake is a teeny bit coarser than Modern Options,
and no mixer ball to help you stir. The paint goes on just fine, though, so
no complaints there. The patina was a different story. I didn't really see
that the patina did anything much to the bronze in the paint. The patina does
have a pretty substantial amount of green powder - I'm guessing copper carbonate,
but don't really know. This seems to be what gives essentially all of the green
color on this next image. I dunno - Ron's site seems to show that he can do
really kick-ass work with his stuff, but at an entry level, it's not all you
could ask for, IMHO. At the prices he asks, I'm just going to stick with
the Modern Options. It looks like you could get good with his
products, and he has a much wider range, but I have a breadth of things I
want to try, and "good-enough" now is better than perfect later.
|
This is a first (and last) attempt at gold-leafing. To start, I just
bought aluminium leaf to practice with. I'm guessing that leafing is
more appropriate for more convex sorts of surfaces than faces.
Pretty obviously, foil won't stretch. The less-obvious corrollary to
this is that if you want to put leaf on a face, you need to accept
that it will happen only in several steps. The first piece around an
eye sticks to the nose, cheek, and brow. Pushing this down with the
brush tears it, and you get some flecks sticking to the eyelid.
Another piece of leaf will cover a bit more, and the last piece just
gets kind of fragmented as you move it around and it sticks haphazardly
to the open spots where there's still uncovered adhesive. I'm sure
this sounds like the canonical newbie mistake-fest to anyone who
knows what they're doing. That said, the only advantage I see to
leafing over paste wax is that the brilliance and sheen of the leaf
are noticeably superior, at a fairly significant increase in the amount
of labor required. The first picture is a nearly fully covered face.
The cracks on the forehead are flaws in the plaster itself, not the leaf.
The second picture is just where I stopped, to illustrate the coverage
you get from pieces of leaf.
|
Modern Options sells a number of metal finishes. This one is their
iron. It's waay too coarse to spray on, though I frankly just haven't
tried. The iron particles are pretty darn coarse, which I suppose is
to keep them from oxidizing into nothing while the paint is being
shipped. The face is a plaster cast which I made way too late; the
bubbles are from the plaster being mostly set before it went into the
mold, rather than the patina solution eating the plaster away. Left
side is one coat of paint, and two or three coats of the rust patina
solution. Right side is just one coat of paint and one of patina.
Nice effect, especially on this already eaten-away looking plaster.
I've had enough bad experiences with spilling iron oxide pigment that
I'm leery of doing this as a regular thing, though.
|
Rub-N'-Buf's "Jade" color. It's a nice metallic green. I fiddled with
this in Photoshop, but the camera's color correction really clobbered
this one. The finish is clumpy, and I suspect that's because I got an
old tube of color. The other colors I got from the same place at the
same time were not nearly so troublesome. Nice effect, but not terribly
useful to me. This ought to get better laid up with the airbrush, but
it's not something I'm really motivated to try.
|
This is PearlEx pigment. The first image below has it in a watercolor
base. I rolled my own, with a recipe I found on the net. There are
a zillion variations, but basically, 1 part gum arabic to 2 parts water.
Dissolve the gum in hot water. Add any of: glycerin, honey, blah, blah,
blah. The gum is the binder that keeps the pigment stuck to whatever,
and anything else is a flow agent, wetting agent, or preservative.
The second picture is the pigment applied with a dry brush onto gold
leaf size, which is just sticky enough to hold the pigment down.
If I were going to sell something like this, I would definitely go
over the top of both of these with some clear binder, probably acrylic.
The reason is that in both cases, the pigment isn't terribly tightly
held, and will come off on your hands. Yes, it really is much
more brilliant when in the watercolor base. No, no idea why.
|
This is a mismade piece I was going to give to the model. The material
is Douglas & Sturgess's coarse
bronze powder in Forton MG. I accellerated the Forton a bit too much,
and by the time it got into the mold, it was so set it was pretty bubbly
on the surface. I mixed another batch later, and smeared it into the
holes, but it looked like a lot of work to sand it smooth, so I just
did another piece, and left this as it was. This has a really neat
raw-pottery sort of feel to it. It's sloppier and more impromptu
than I like, plus it's hard to reproduce each time for sale, so I just
have this in my collection.
|
Another cautionary tale. This is from a "Deco Art Bronzing Kit",
and is their "bronze" color. Looks pretty damn copper to me. Further,
in case you can't tell from the picture, the particle size is
really coarse. This would be fine for sponging through a
stencil onto terra cotta for potted plants, say, or adding a splash
of color, but this is just too coarse to not be distracting on a face.
|
An example of mixing pigment into the wet plaster. This one came
out fairly well, but I think it's because I didn't mix it too
thoroughly. I did the exact same proportions on a head for a
model, and it came out very very orange. You can see that this
one isn't quite even in the color distribution. I don't do this
often at all, because I'm a slob when I'm working, and concentrated
pigments are not very forgiving of slobbiness.
|
Douglas & Sturgess' Bronzing Powder No. 106. The downside of
D&S is that in repackaging larger lots into smaller lots, they
relabel many things with their own numbering scheme. This, I
suppose, is helpful if they change suppliers and are providing
substantially the same thing. On the other hand, it makes it
harder to know precisely what you're getting, brand comparison-wise.
Nevertheless, this is a really really nice bronze look - a bit dark,
as though the piece has seen a bit of age, but not so dark that
it looks as if you're trying to fake a bronze look.
|
A pair of experiments with do-it-yourself patination. Rather than
pay a zillion dollars for the patina chems, I did a little bit of
research. This is the Sculpt Nouveau Bronze B (left) and Modern Options'
Blond Bronze (right). One coat, and then into a gallon ziploc bag
with a couple of tablespoons of clear ammonia on a paper towel.
The streaking on the left image is due to the baggy clinging to the
face, and not exposing the paint to the fumes. As it turns out,
this was probably overkill. Acrylic says it's good against water
and mild acids, but specifically excludes ammonia. If I were to
try this again, I'd give a couple of coats of the base color and let
that dry for several days, then recoat, let dry to touch, and then
into the baggy. This has kind of a a moss agate look to it, but
the brush strokes are a bit too obvious to suit my taste.
|
The piece on the left is the Bronze B again, with Modern Options'
blue patina solution. Came out pretty well, but not nearly as
thorough a coverage as with the Modern Options paint. There's no
label on the other one, so I'm going to guess that it's
Bronze B again, with green patina not doing much of anything except
leaving blue streaks.
|
Just to do something different, this is tissue paper under
Douglas & Sturgess' Art Medium B (white glue, or something very
similar).
|
White portland cement with "Lapis Lustre" sand. This is a good
demonstration of how aggregate will settle in the lowest part
(the nose). The third picture is just to show the edge where
I didn't quite fill the mold. I was used to plaser, and was
figuring that the concrete would settle a lot less than it did.
I learned that you need to cast in a mold that's pretty much
level all around to help with this. It surprised me that the
concrete took detail this well. I guess I'm just used to seeing
it used in driveways and bridges and other large scale stuff.
|
Same piece, same shots, but with the piece wet. The concrete
really gets translucent, and the sand shows through. When the
piece dries out again, the whiteness returns just fine, though.
This piece has been in an artificial rain simulator for a week,
and is no worse for wear.
|
This is Forton MG, with very fine copper powder. This time,
not enough accelerator. The copper settled into the nose so
well that not enough binder stayed around to keep it from
crumbling when the piece was demolded. The cracks are from
trying to push too little mix around to cover the face until
the mix was already set. The white showing through the cracks
is a backing layer of FGR-95 and fiberglass. This has been
sitting outside to see if it'll pick up a patina naturally.
So far, it's just gotten darker; no sign of greens or blues
yet.
|
This is Modern Options' Blond Bronze over GardenCast. It's been
sitting outside for about a year, and it's just starting to pick
up a bit of blue patina. The flecks around the nose look more
like failures in the skin of the paint, while the blue patch
under the chin looks more like water is getting in from the back
and reacting with the metal that way. This was a purposely bad job -
just a couple of coats of the paint, no clear sealer, and the back
of the piece is unfinished. Nevertheless, it's held up pretty well.
|
First, an object lesson in what not to do. This was supposed to have
been a sample piece, with Modern Options
blonde bronze paint. Just the paint on the left, and a gloss acrylic from
Aervoe on top. I was trying to get the
thing done in a hurry. I did the color coat, and gave it about an hour.
The paint was dry to the touch, but I knew I'd had trouble in the past with
masking tape pulling up the paint. This time, I used really low-tack tape
meant just for holding down drawings. A couple of brief tests showed no
problems, but either time alone, or time plus the solvents from the spray
gloss conspired to lift big chunks of the acrylic. The white areas on
the right are just highlights from the lamps, not peeled places.
Next is "Bronze B" from Sculpt Nouveau.
Ron Young is the artist there, and he has written what is apparently a
well respected book on the topic of patination: Contemporary Patination.
I don't have it myself, though, so no opinions there. On the basis of good
reviews, I ordered a small sample of this paint, and some green patina.
The paint is supposed to have the virtue that you can apply patina to it after
it's dry. The patina, in addition to chemical action, also has some oxide color
added. When I got my order, in addition to the paint and patina, I also got
a load of other stuff. Directions, a catalog, and a couple of samples. Very
nice. Unfortunately, I have to say that I was pretty disappointed in the patina.
The paint was fine. The metal flake is a teeny bit coarser than Modern Options,
and no mixer ball to help you stir. The paint goes on just fine, though, so
no complaints there. The patina was a different story. I didn't really see
that the patina did anything much to the bronze in the paint. The patina does
have a pretty substantial amount of green powder - I'm guessing copper carbonate,
but don't really know. This seems to be what gives essentially all of the green
color on this next image. I dunno - Ron's site seems to show that he can do
really kick-ass work with his stuff, but at an entry level, it's not all you
could ask for, IMHO. At the prices he asks, I'm just going to stick with
the Modern Options. It looks like you could get good with his
products, and he has a much wider range, but I have a breadth of things I
want to try, and "good-enough" now is better than perfect later.
This is a first (and last) attempt at gold-leafing. To start, I just
bought aluminium leaf to practice with. I'm guessing that leafing is
more appropriate for more convex sorts of surfaces than faces.
Pretty obviously, foil won't stretch. The less-obvious corrollary to
this is that if you want to put leaf on a face, you need to accept
that it will happen only in several steps. The first piece around an
eye sticks to the nose, cheek, and brow. Pushing this down with the
brush tears it, and you get some flecks sticking to the eyelid.
Another piece of leaf will cover a bit more, and the last piece just
gets kind of fragmented as you move it around and it sticks haphazardly
to the open spots where there's still uncovered adhesive. I'm sure
this sounds like the canonical newbie mistake-fest to anyone who
knows what they're doing. That said, the only advantage I see to
leafing over paste wax is that the brilliance and sheen of the leaf
are noticeably superior, at a fairly significant increase in the amount
of labor required. The first picture is a nearly fully covered face.
The cracks on the forehead are flaws in the plaster itself, not the leaf.
The second picture is just where I stopped, to illustrate the coverage
you get from pieces of leaf.
Modern Options sells a number of metal finishes. This one is their
iron. It's waay too coarse to spray on, though I frankly just haven't
tried. The iron particles are pretty darn coarse, which I suppose is
to keep them from oxidizing into nothing while the paint is being
shipped. The face is a plaster cast which I made way too late; the
bubbles are from the plaster being mostly set before it went into the
mold, rather than the patina solution eating the plaster away. Left
side is one coat of paint, and two or three coats of the rust patina
solution. Right side is just one coat of paint and one of patina.
Nice effect, especially on this already eaten-away looking plaster.
I've had enough bad experiences with spilling iron oxide pigment that
I'm leery of doing this as a regular thing, though.
Rub-N'-Buf's "Jade" color. It's a nice metallic green. I fiddled with
this in Photoshop, but the camera's color correction really clobbered
this one. The finish is clumpy, and I suspect that's because I got an
old tube of color. The other colors I got from the same place at the
same time were not nearly so troublesome. Nice effect, but not terribly
useful to me. This ought to get better laid up with the airbrush, but
it's not something I'm really motivated to try.
This is PearlEx pigment. The first image below has it in a watercolor
base. I rolled my own, with a recipe I found on the net. There are
a zillion variations, but basically, 1 part gum arabic to 2 parts water.
Dissolve the gum in hot water. Add any of: glycerin, honey, blah, blah,
blah. The gum is the binder that keeps the pigment stuck to whatever,
and anything else is a flow agent, wetting agent, or preservative.
The second picture is the pigment applied with a dry brush onto gold
leaf size, which is just sticky enough to hold the pigment down.
If I were going to sell something like this, I would definitely go
over the top of both of these with some clear binder, probably acrylic.
The reason is that in both cases, the pigment isn't terribly tightly
held, and will come off on your hands. Yes, it really is much
more brilliant when in the watercolor base. No, no idea why.
This is a mismade piece I was going to give to the model. The material
is Douglas & Sturgess's coarse
bronze powder in Forton MG. I accellerated the Forton a bit too much,
and by the time it got into the mold, it was so set it was pretty bubbly
on the surface. I mixed another batch later, and smeared it into the
holes, but it looked like a lot of work to sand it smooth, so I just
did another piece, and left this as it was. This has a really neat
raw-pottery sort of feel to it. It's sloppier and more impromptu
than I like, plus it's hard to reproduce each time for sale, so I just
have this in my collection.
Another cautionary tale. This is from a "Deco Art Bronzing Kit",
and is their "bronze" color. Looks pretty damn copper to me. Further,
in case you can't tell from the picture, the particle size is
really coarse. This would be fine for sponging through a
stencil onto terra cotta for potted plants, say, or adding a splash
of color, but this is just too coarse to not be distracting on a face.
An example of mixing pigment into the wet plaster. This one came
out fairly well, but I think it's because I didn't mix it too
thoroughly. I did the exact same proportions on a head for a
model, and it came out very very orange. You can see that this
one isn't quite even in the color distribution. I don't do this
often at all, because I'm a slob when I'm working, and concentrated
pigments are not very forgiving of slobbiness.
Douglas & Sturgess' Bronzing Powder No. 106. The downside of
D&S is that in repackaging larger lots into smaller lots, they
relabel many things with their own numbering scheme. This, I
suppose, is helpful if they change suppliers and are providing
substantially the same thing. On the other hand, it makes it
harder to know precisely what you're getting, brand comparison-wise.
Nevertheless, this is a really really nice bronze look - a bit dark,
as though the piece has seen a bit of age, but not so dark that
it looks as if you're trying to fake a bronze look.
A pair of experiments with do-it-yourself patination. Rather than
pay a zillion dollars for the patina chems, I did a little bit of
research. This is the Sculpt Nouveau Bronze B (left) and Modern Options'
Blond Bronze (right). One coat, and then into a gallon ziploc bag
with a couple of tablespoons of clear ammonia on a paper towel.
The streaking on the left image is due to the baggy clinging to the
face, and not exposing the paint to the fumes. As it turns out,
this was probably overkill. Acrylic says it's good against water
and mild acids, but specifically excludes ammonia. If I were to
try this again, I'd give a couple of coats of the base color and let
that dry for several days, then recoat, let dry to touch, and then
into the baggy. This has kind of a a moss agate look to it, but
the brush strokes are a bit too obvious to suit my taste.
The piece on the left is the Bronze B again, with Modern Options'
blue patina solution. Came out pretty well, but not nearly as
thorough a coverage as with the Modern Options paint. There's no
label on the other one, so I'm going to guess that it's
Bronze B again, with green patina not doing much of anything except
leaving blue streaks.
Just to do something different, this is tissue paper under
Douglas & Sturgess' Art Medium B (white glue, or something very
similar).
White portland cement with "Lapis Lustre" sand. This is a good
demonstration of how aggregate will settle in the lowest part
(the nose). The third picture is just to show the edge where
I didn't quite fill the mold. I was used to plaser, and was
figuring that the concrete would settle a lot less than it did.
I learned that you need to cast in a mold that's pretty much
level all around to help with this. It surprised me that the
concrete took detail this well. I guess I'm just used to seeing
it used in driveways and bridges and other large scale stuff.
Same piece, same shots, but with the piece wet. The concrete
really gets translucent, and the sand shows through. When the
piece dries out again, the whiteness returns just fine, though.
This piece has been in an artificial rain simulator for a week,
and is no worse for wear.
This is Forton MG, with very fine copper powder. This time,
not enough accelerator. The copper settled into the nose so
well that not enough binder stayed around to keep it from
crumbling when the piece was demolded. The cracks are from
trying to push too little mix around to cover the face until
the mix was already set. The white showing through the cracks
is a backing layer of FGR-95 and fiberglass. This has been
sitting outside to see if it'll pick up a patina naturally.
So far, it's just gotten darker; no sign of greens or blues
yet.
This is Modern Options' Blond Bronze over GardenCast. It's been
sitting outside for about a year, and it's just starting to pick
up a bit of blue patina. The flecks around the nose look more
like failures in the skin of the paint, while the blue patch
under the chin looks more like water is getting in from the back
and reacting with the metal that way. This was a purposely bad job -
just a couple of coats of the paint, no clear sealer, and the back
of the piece is unfinished. Nevertheless, it's held up pretty well.