Right now I am busy making jewelry for an upcoming show. (My last show went great, so I'm a little low on inventory!) Yesterday I was working with some silver metal clay that I had just fired, so thought I'd take a couple of behind the scenes pictures.
A patina is a coloring that we put on the metal, usually to show detail. In this case, I had some earring components that had Chinese characters stamped in them, and I want to make sure the characters are visible. Silver is so reflective, that unless I do something, they will be hard to see.
Below is what they look like when I start. Here they are all shiny, because I have run them through the tumbler. The Black Max is in the jar. It looks like really dark pee! But it will turn black on the silver.
I could just dip them in the Black Max, but then that's more black to gunk up the steel shot in my tumbler. So I decided just to paint the detail with the patina, and that way, hopefully, it would polish up quicker and be less dirty on my shot.
Here are the pieces after I painted them:
Next I put them in my tumbler with the steel shot and burnishing compound and tumble them for awhile. The surface gets clean but the shot doesn't get into the recesses, so those don't get clean. That's the plan anyway.
Here they are in my tumbler:
After tumbling for awhile, the letters/characters are black, and the rest is shiny silver. I didn't take a picture of them because I was too anxious to make the earrings.
Here is a picture of the finished product:
Hope you enjoyed that quick look at Black Max patina. Do you ever use patina? What kind of patina do you like to use?
