A patina is usually defined as a thin layer of color that coats a piece of metal. You've seen this on copper pieces that turn green. That is technically a patina. Luckily for us,you don't have to wait for the test of time to cover your metal with a patina. I found Vintaj patina's at my local craft store. These are inks made specially for applying to metal. So, let's have a play.
You can technically apply these patina's to flat metal, but that's kind of boring. Patina's are better when they are put on a texture or in the recesses of a piece. So I decided to play around with a little texture to see what we could do.
First I started by hammering some metal to give it a nice texture. Because I wanted to have deeper indents I used aluminum because it is such a soft metal
After hammering I decided on my shapes and cut them out.
I wanted to try something different than hammering so I played around with a punch in order to make raised dots on my pieces. These are all going to be earrings, can you tell?
After I had my textures and shapes settled, I wiped them down with rubbing alcohol to remove my sharpie marks. After that I went ahead and painted the patina on by putting a drop on some saran wrap, and using an old brush. I let it dry between coats and repeated until I was happy with the coverage. I didn't take pictures of this part because my hands were dirty.
Then after that I took a nail file (the big square blocky kind) and I carefully sanded down the tops of the pieces to reveal the texture with the patina settled in.
What do you think?
These are fun because you can use a solid color or paint them together to make a more natural blending.
