Tarnished Silver Leaves
Amy Shawley
The blog theme for May is Metallic Textures! All month long I'll be exploring fun ways you can use texture and iridescent colors in your work! Look for mostly tutorials and videos, with a little bit of history and science here and there! These projects are different from what is featured in my book, so those who have already tried some of my texture projects will get a whole new batch to play around with!
I love the look of tarnished silver and wanted to incorporate that into the project this week. For this project you will need to make a textured "acrylic skin", which is a sheet of plastic that you can make on any surface acrylic paint won't adhere to (ie: glass, freezer paper, silicone). You can build up one by hand with layers of acrylic gels or pastes or you can cast one in a silicone mold. One of my favorite products to make molds from is Amazing Mold Putty. Pictured below I am using one of my silicone-based Texture Maven molds in the leaf pattern (also pictured is the Crowsfoot pattern, but this project focuses on the leaves!).
Acrylic skins can be made out of many acrylic colors and mediums with the exception of highly gritty or brittle materials - here I am using Soft Gel (Gloss), it is white when wet but dries completely transparent. Use a palette knife and with light pressure, fill the mold with gel. Don't worry too much about your palette knife marks as they will not be seen in the final image, but be sure to make the gel thick enough so that it fills the texture valleys of the mold and sits above the lines in the mold by about 1/8" of an inch. Gels shrink when they dry, so if the gel is flush with the lines in the mold, your acrylic skin will break apart in pieces instead of a sheet - this can be pretty cool too though, so try experimenting to see what you like!
At this thickness the gel may take a few days to dry and cure in your painting environment. Mine took 48 hours. When the skin is ready it will peel right out of the mold - notice below how it retains the form of the mold. If you want to, cut out some pattern from the skin, I cut some voids from the skin so that it wasn't fully square...
Next you will want to paint the acrylic skin! When I talk about this in demos, the biggest question I get is "Can I cast it in a color to skip this step?". The answer is yes, but the reason I don't is that is more cost effective to cast thickly with gels and add a thin layer of color afterwards and you also won't change the properties of the color by diluting it or changing its sheen by tinting it with a gel.
When the silver layer is dry, give it a tarnished look by buffing some Raw Umber or Carbon Black into the texture valleys. Use a brush (with a touch of water in it to improve the flow of color) and apply the paint to the textured skin, then use a rag to buff the excess color off of of the texture peaks. If you make your surface too dark, you can use this same buffing application to apply more silver back to the surface!
Feel free to use whatever size substrate you want. I had a 6x6 inch canvas from another project that I wanted to cover up, so I painted it with a coat of Raw Umber to mask what was below and have a nice dark base color that harmonized with the Raw Umber I used to "tarnish" my silver...
The next step is to adhere the skin to the substrate. You can use any standard acrylic gel to do this, here I am using Heavy Gel - mainly because it was sitting on the table next to me and was the first thing I reached for, but also because I like using thicker, high viscosity gels to adhere bulkier items so that I don't have to clamp them down. Spread the gel across the substrate and be sure that the gel is sandwiched between the substrate and the back of the skin. This acrylic skin is not heavily porous and will not soak through if you try to "glue" it down by putting gel on top of it the way you might do with some collage papers. Gently press the skin into the gel and brush around the excess gel to give the substrate its own texture!
For my surface, I made a second acrylic skin to adhere on top of the first one. I cast this acrylic skin from a mold I made of an actual leaf. I used something called Amazing Mold Putty, rolled it out so it was about 1/8" and pretty flat, then pressed a leaf into the putty. When the putty cured (takes about 20-30min to cure), I peeled the leaf out and its texture remained. I repeated the same steps from above to make and paint this acrylic "leaf"...
To finish up my texture, I adhered the second leaf skin to the first using Heavy Gel, added a touch of Iridescent Silver to my Raw Umber background, unified my textures and sheen with a coat of Heavy Gel Semi Gloss (notice it is white when wet but dries translucent), then added some areas of Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold to enhance the "tarnished" look.
Depending on your preferred style of work, you can keep developing this texture or leave it be. You may like to have it as an embellishment on a much larger surface instead of covering the whole width of the image. Acrylic skins can be used to add textures to flat substrates like canvas and panels, but can also be adhered to sculptural substrates like ceramic. If you find yourself using this technique in a project, dont hesitate to email me with your questions! For more textured acrylic skin ideas, check out my books!
Tarnished Silver Leaves, Acrylic Skins on Canvas, 6x6 inches