Order of Process

[Danny Baronian]

OLD FORUM POST

Order of Process Posted by Harry Oresko on March 22, 2004

When doing a reverse glass job that requires both silver and gold leaf, I do the following....
(condensed version)...
1. If chipping is done
2. Clean glass
3. Tin, silver, back-up with asphaltum, silver strip, shallack
4. Lay gold leaf, back-up enamel,etc, etc.
..................................................
Can you do gold chloride first, and silver, then back-up enamel, clean off unwanted gold, then tin, and silver over the whole glass?
There is always more than one way to skin a cat!
I read Dave Smith's gold and silver with vinyl on another post, was totally different also. Thanks all for coments etc..

Mike Jackson

Harry,
I don't know how much you can get away with combining the two solution gilds. The two major issues are getting the glass clean on the second process (silver) and keeping the original back up from lifting while cleaning, tinning, solution silvering and clean up. The paint Rick sold for mirror back up was quite a bit more water resistant than the Dekor Gloss ink or his Fine Gold bBack Up. Those two would work to some extent, but I wouldn't trust it to much emmersion.
Dave's process of using mask and rolling the paint back up give a much heavier paint layer than screen printing or hand lettering.

Others may have had better results/attempts than me.

If you have the right circumstances (design), if found you can sometimes wipe away areas of gold with cotton just before you tin the glass for the silvering step. When I say "sometimes" if mean it! On some Angel Gilding days, the gold drops down and aggressively attaches to the glass. On other days, it just sits lightly on the surface. The silvering covers and it helps bind the thin gold layer to the glass. Then there are varying degress in between.

The silvering step then covers the gold areas, and also covers ungilded areas in one step.

Hope it helps!
Mike Jackson

Sarah King

Harry
I haven't done much with this yet but I did take the beer signs Danny did for the Conclave and mirror the back of all three. It worked pretty well. I did silver on top of the gold one, lead on top of the silver and gold on top of the lead. It worked pretty well. I think mirroring on top of a back mirror will work fine once I've practiced a bit more.

When I did Danny's signs, I cleaned the glass twice with Sparkle glass cleaner but no cerium oxide or anything. The gold went down just fine, although straight gold on top of silver with no dark line in between doesn't offer much contrast and the sign is a little hard to read.

The lead mirror solution lifted the asphaltum backing right off the silver as it was depositing but the silver itself stayed intact - and the contrast is really cool. I ended up with strips of asphaltum backing all over the mirroring tray but I found that it didn't matter. Since the lead chemicals have sulphur in them, the silver tranished slightly so now the sign looks old. If that's the look your after, it's great. I like it a lot.

I plan to do more with this idea soon. I think that what you do is
a) back the first deposition with asphaltum and let it dry
b) clean the glass - and alsphaltum - very well using just a glass cleaner like Sparkle
c) tin and rinse and proceed.

I think there are a lot of possibilities here. I'm going to have to learn silk screening before I can really proceed.