Adventures With Patina

I became interested in working with patina or verdigris after seeing the jewelry created by We Dream in Colour a few years ago.  Jewelry designer and artist Jade Gedeon creates delicate, colorful, and whimsical pieces.  I especially love her use of plant and animal elements.  She uses a lot of verdigris and sheer enameling.  Because of the wonderful colors and finishes in her work, I spent time researching how to patina and enamel at home.  Since an enameling kiln would set me back a few hundred dollars and a bottle of JAX patina would only cost $14 I decided to try patina first.

I purchased the JAX patina and a variety of brass shapes at Metalliferous in midtown NYC - their website will give you a small taste of the treasures in the store. If you are ever in NYC and like to make jewelry this place is giant playground.  It is filled with all sorts of brass, copper, and pewter bits - they also have a great deal of tools, manuals and other resources.  They only have sterling and basemetal findings, which is my only complaint because I prefer gold-filled findings.  I love the story because you have to poke around in the bins to find anything - its a hodgepodge but a surprisingly well organized one.

At first I was disappointed in the results I got by using just the patina on some leaf shaped brass charms.  I decided to do some more research on patinas and found a company called Sculpt Nouveau that manufactures a variety of patina related products.  After calculating that the shipping costs would be about $43 if I ordered from their website, I found a store called Compleat Sculptor in NYC that carries Sculpt Nouveau.  A kind employee pointed me in the direction of Dye-Oxide Patina in the bright blue I was looking for.  This was a liquid I could layer over the JAX patina to alter the patina color.  I was able to get much more variation but I wasn't thrilled.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="197" caption="Verdigris Process Photo from LivingPast.com"][/caption]

During this time I found the following website - http://sca.livingpast.com/verd.html - I was mystified as to who wrote the site but the research and photos were fantastic AND the examples had the brilliant blue I wanted to create.

The website includes a great step by step description of cultivating verdigris on some scrap copper and hilarious descriptions of historic accounts of how to create verdigris (which was used for a variety of pigment needs).

The process was simple enough - enclose metal in container with cider vinegar and leave for a few days.  The metal should not touch the vinegar but be suspended above it.

I sacrificed a small Tupperware container to the art/craft gods and put a few metal pieces on an overturned bowl inside the Tupperware, added an inch of vinegar and waited about two days.  The metal pieces developed small bright blue dots but nothing like the thick bright color in the example to the left.  The dots were bright blue, but fairly translucent.  I wasn't super excited about the result so I decided to add a layer of JAX patina and then left in the covered Tupperware for a day or so.  This process created some some wonderful results.

[caption id="attachment_52" align="alignleft" width="165" caption="Firefly earrings with gold-filled earring wires."][/caption]

My next patina project involved some brass leaves with variegated texture.  I got beautiful blue and green patina on one of the leaves and finished that with a little slow drying acrylic glaze followed by some Renaissance wax.  I also tried finishing a patinaed leaf with some clear acrylic spray.  This resulted in a charm that mimicked the look of transparent green enamel.   The third round of patina experimentation included several brass pieces and one copper piece in the shape of a bird.  I covered these pieces with some JAX patina before putting them into a tupperware filled with cider vinegar.  This time I suspended the metal pieces over the vinegar using a piece of nylon stockings.  This technique - JAX then vinegar exposure - resulted in one of my favorite necklace centerpieces I've created in a while - a copper bird completely covered in verdigris with a large range of tonal variation.  The other pieces turned out nicely as well - my only complaint is that I wish I had pulled out one or two of them earlier before the pale green effect from the JAX had turned completely into the bright verdigris teal color that develops after exposure to the vinegar.

My plan is to continue experimenting with different metal shapes - I've found that the mixture of metal as well as the shape affects the results.  I also need to continue to refine how I finish the pieces to make the patina permanent.

[caption id="attachment_67" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Raw brass and copper pieces."][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Pieces with JAX patina after being exposed to vinegar for approximately 24 hours."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_68" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="A variety of finished pieces."]

[/caption]