Posted by roderick on January 13, 2004
Larry WhiteSo you've got your piece all chippied and ready to mirror.You mirror it and you want to have the letters painted with mirrored glow lines,background chiped.if i'm lettering it by hand do I back it up the same as with gold,coming back after to trim my corners and then clean the excess mirror off or what?And what do you clean it off with silver strip?
Thanks for the help
Roderick
Mike JacksonRick used to sell a product he called "Mirror Backup". When dry it was a bit flexible and it didn't work so well in a brush. This backup was used to keep the silver from tarnishing. Later he switched to backing up silver with asphaltum. Asphaltum works well in a brush, won't tarnish the silver and was a less expensive product to use. You can trim the asphaltum off your corners as usual, but use the silver strip to remove the silver. Wear gloves when using silver strip. Peacock Labs has an on-line MSDS for the stuff if you want to know what you're dealing with.
-LW
RoderickRoderick, back up any parts you want to protect with mirror back up paint (however you want to do it--screen or hand letter, and as carefully as you can). When dry, you simply wet a piece of cotton with the silver strip and wipe it across the glass. Any exposed mirror will magically disapper right in front of your eyes. It requires absolutely no rubbing. For this reason, mirror back up paint needs to be able to repel water fairly well, but doesn't have to be too tough. Additionally, from what I understand, mirror back up paint has less sulphur in it, making it less prone to tarnishing the silver. It might lack other similar compounds, too. When looking over the internet, I found quite a few water based mirror back up paint, but I didn't specifically find the paint Rick sold. Maybe others know.
When Esoteric2 opened, I immediately called wanting to order a quart or two of mirror back up. They didn't have any or know where to look in the shop for more. Maybe they have replaced it now?
Good luck,
Mike Jackson
Mike JacksonSo you can't use gold back-up paint or asphaltum?Can you trim it like gold.?
Roderick
Mike JacksonI believe you "can" use about anything, but some paints will tarnish the silver over a period of time...maybe good if that is the desired effect. You can see some of it in the corners of this project. It tarnished to some degree within a few months, leveled off, and hasn't turned any darker in the past 15 years. I think it was dekor gloss black, but it has been to long to be certain.
Yes, you can trim away with a razor blade as with gold.
Mike Jackson
Mike Jackson - One more thing...Just for reference, this is the first piece I ever silvered, and without a lot of guidance or the Internet for support, I found out the hard way you should actually silver first. I tried silvering last, and ended up washing off some of the blue and some of the other detailing. I had to clean that all up and rescreen parts of it.
With all that said, this was the perfect project. It was a plate for the colorized Atkinson book and I had time to get it done without customer pressure. At the same time, since I had volunteered to do the piece, I had to make it work.
Mike Jackson
One more thing....
It might not be totally obvious, but if you study the silvered section, you might see that chipping and silvering the background areas could have saved me a lot of time. (there was some acid etching around the border and that would have been done prior to silvering). By making a screen that backed up the silvered areas, I would have left open the blue wreath, shield, small lettering, and all the main letters and outlines. With a little silver strip, the unprotected areas would open right up. Then it would have been easy to fill in the letter from behind with a large brush or even blended if desired.
There is a thin black outline around the main gold letters, so if I made a screen for those lines and printed them, all I had to do was fill in the rust colored outlines with a brush (really easy since I would have only needed to be careful on the one side against the printed black outline). That would have left open the letters for easy water gilding. The screen used to print the thin black outlines on the main lettering would have also been used to print the black lines in the decorative border and that would have made the rest easy, too!
So, armed with a few years of experience since that panel was made, I could have saved a lot of work and a lot of time just by understanding a few steps better and getting all of them in order. By the time we worked through five or six of our glass art projects, I had a pretty good handle on how to get the most bang for each screen.
Despite all we learned and all we thought we knew, we still had to work out details and problems on the fly. We usually started with around 18 glass pieces and lost a few along the way due to screen misalingment, ink problems, or similar issues. At times, I longed for the simplicity of just doing one or two of something, but the demands of doing a bunch of the same signs thing taught us lessons we would have never learned. On quite a few occasions, we felt we were taking two steps forward and one back.
Mike Jackson
John Studden
Larry White - Really?You can back-up Silver with Fine Gold Back-Up or FDE if you first lightly spray the silver with
Shellac, this acts as a barrier for the paint.
I have done this several times with no problems.
Mike JacksonJohn-
Doesn't the shellac impede the silver strip from removing the excess silver?
-LW
Larry, prior to using the silver strip, you'd have to go over the sprayed area with alcohol to remove the oversprayed shellac. That wouldn't be much of a problem.
As an alternative, I suspect you could screen one time with shellac, clean the screen and then screen with asphaltum. The other way might be easier?
I didn't like screening with asphaltum. For one thing, it is usually a little too thin. You can beef it up with dry asphaltum powder (available at some art supply stores). We used screened asphaltum as an acid resist on some projects, but a single screening is not enough. When we let the asphaltum dry, then applied a second coat, the new layer immediately bonded with the underlayer as we screened and wanted to lift the glass. Even with two good coats, we had to manually touch up small openings and air bubbles. Acid would find every one of them if we didn't. Those were terribly apparent when angel gilding. I can remember a lot of people at the conclaves arched over the light table touching up pin holes and thin areas on their screened asphaltum areas.
Asphaltum dries fairly fast, but still remains soft for a while. We usually used a bag of dry asphaltum powder in a pounce bag to wipe over the screened areas before running the second print. That seemed to help.
We found we got the best results screening asphaltum with a more coarse mesh screen than with a fine mesh screen. For acid etching and normal back up, small jaggies were not a problem.
As always, there are numerous opinions and numerous ways of doing the same job.
Mike Jackson
John Studden
Larry,
A quick wipe with denatured alcohol will take care of that. I did most of my old cigar mirrors using that method, they have been OK for 10 years or more.......
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