HOW TO CREATE A FAUX AGED BRONZE PATINA & FINISH create a lustrous depth best quality approach paint

We're on the home stretch here. Okay so I don't want to get my base here dirty with the shoe polish so I basically got some boards of the same thickness. This is pretty straight forward except you're going to develop your own touch in the process. So where you end up putting this on is entirely up to you. You may not want to cover everything because this will darken it quite a bit but you might want to leave some of the accent marks which will be darkened. I kind of like some of this stuff going on the base here. This really starts to look like bronze that's been hit with cupric which is one of the patina chemicals but I don't necessarily like that throughout this piece and I do want to darken some areas and this is replicating a type of like aged look, aged bronze. So obviously when a sculpture is in the public view people like to touch sculptures so we know that these outside surfaces are going to be areas that get touched and there was like one I saw, I don't know if it was, I think it was somewhere in Italy. There was a Madonna and Child and they had to put it behind glass because everyone was touching it but they left the hand exposed so the hand was sticking out through the plexiglass and it just, it was polished bronze, completely shiny because it was always getting touched. The whole sculpture would end up becoming that way if they left it alone so to protect the integrity they put it behind the glass. So anyway all I'm saying here is that this black sometimes is good in some of the more recessed areas but you want to make sure you can get in there too and wipe it a little bit so you'll just have to get a feel for it and decide what's best for you. If some areas look too bright you can knock them back. This is a way that I like to say knocking back some areas if it looks too bright. So the areas that you really want to have stand out are like the show stoppers which would be like the face and other parts like the hands, pay attention to those and how well you do those. So somebody isn't like say going to notice so much about the detail that you spend on the base for example. So take your time. That was a bright green color, I just totally played that down. So you see how I darkened her face with the black shoe polish and I'm just continuing to work this. And even though it looks like a lot of this green that I put on there is getting covered up, these are more layers that are going to add to the richness of the patina and you might overdo it and then want to blame me and if you want to do that that's fine. But practice is going to prove the error in your thinking. Okay so at this point a shoe polish brush, if you can find a brush it will work for you great, kiwi, kiwi shoe polish. This is a horse hair type mixture is what it says. Western Germany, so they're not communists in Western Germany, at least they weren't when this was made. Okay so there's that and I hope you can see the difference there. So this arm hasn't been treated, this has been treated and this looks like a very very aged bronze, very old and perhaps even treated at some point. Some bronzes that are really really old will just look like a really old penny. But this has more of that kind of green and black quality that you might see in some of the old French pieces like during the impressionist era. Okay so I went through and just finished covering her with the black shoe polish. You can see where some areas I left a little more open like I didn't cover those quite, just kind of went between them. So I would just kind of brush around them strategically leaving it so it's kind of balanced. And I really like this on the back here so I left that and on the front. So when I was going around the base I left this area alone and went in here because that area is generally going to be dark but I left some area in here which is typical to see in a bronze, you know when it's outside. Of course we want to bring that effect into an indoor piece. And left the back of the leg some of these subtleties I thought were nice. And in between the neck and so forth it was just driving me crazy. I mean I could have left that run mark in there but I didn't want it so I just used a q-tip and I got in there and went to town on it. Got into some of those more recessed areas. So then I just used this brush and went over it, the whole thing where I could and the hands. And with these brushes you don't need to grind away like you're, you know, sanding. Just very gently and you'll get a very nice polish. In fact you can take shoe polish with a cotton ball and just a little bit of water and bring out a really high shine just by going slowly and consistently with some persistence. I'm trying to be careful too because, you know, I don't want to put too much pressure on here. Even though this is strong this is still a very weak part in the sculpture. And, you know, going real fast too you can bang and bring chips and all that stuff. Just why do you want it? So at this point I have some really nice modeling textures that you might not be able to see within the dark areas. But now it's time to add more of the Bronze B. So the way that I like to do this is to take a piece of cloth, not a brush because brushes leave brush marks, and I'm going to just get a little bit on a cloth and then dab the excess out of the cloth and then go in there and then just gently highlight areas and make sure you don't have any plaster dust on your gloves. So again I'm just getting that on there and I'm just going to do a little blot area. And it's always scary, but just remember you only got to do the work again if you don't like it. So after you've gone around your sculpture and your cloth is mainly dry, still a little bit of dampness, you can kind of go in and rub some of those areas, try to let in some daylight for a second, and then try to blend those areas a little better. It does help a little, but we can go gangbusters. Some areas are going to be brighter than you wanted them to be and too thick, like this back to me. If I were to leave it like this it would be a mess, I think, but I'm going to go back through with some black, knock it back, and here's another trick. You can take a little bit of what's left, not a whole sopping lot, and then just go over the edge so that it doesn't come over too much, but you're just highlighting the edge because this happens a lot in bronzes. They tend to get touched or rubbed there on the edges and that helps create a little bit of highlight, bring a little more attention to it. Just gently touch the toes for effect, bring a little bit of highlight. So now I may go back and touch it up just a little more, but I want to knock that back. Her face has a little too much highlight and I'm going to knock this back. So again, I'm going to go through that process. Okay, so this is a process of back and forth, might apply a little more, but I'm going to work on this for a little bit. I've got to close off the daylight to my studio so that I can do this properly, but this is where we're at. I'm going to, like I said, apply the black to the areas where I want to knock back the highlights, and then I'm just going to polish it again, so I'll be back. Okay, so let me just point this out. So I just did this area through here up to the bottom of the scapula and across, and I just blackened that area and brushed it. You can see how good it looks right from here. It really draws attention to the brightness in this area and the brightness up above. And although it doesn't look like there's a huge color difference, you can notice something. And of course, you can appreciate the form because it's there, but I'm trying to bring it to your attention of how to think about darkening which areas to knock back the brightness and how to highlight the other areas. So there we go. So what I've done here is I've taken where the bronze has left a distinct break between where I blotted it and the dark. I just apply some more of this. For those of you that actually want to know, like need to know what I'm doing exactly, I apply it on top of that break where the bronze paint, and I just work it until it starts to camouflage or blend. And like I said, I did that area, and then I can go back to some of those areas that maybe just weren't favorable. And then I tried to darken some areas like under here and perhaps between the ribs and make those stand out a little better. I left this highlighted. I did blend it a little bit. So let's get to polishing here. This will be the final polish. But I highlighted the pooch right here. So when I was darkening this, I stopped well, you know, before that and left this area alone. And see, you can use these patinas to help accent the forms. And if you think that that's somehow against purest values, well, let me tell you. If you use a high gloss, it will ruin your sculpture, so why not be strategic about it and use something to enhance your sculpture. So down here at the feet, I'm going to just apply it a little more to knock that back. That highlighted a little too strongly. I don't mind that there's some highlight, but I don't want it to dominate. I want it to suggest. That looks pretty good. So now I have enough coming down from the body down the feet. So she's, in essence, done, I think, and I better stick with my original plan. So this is the finished product. I went ahead and put a felt pad on the bottom. So it's a 3M product. This is quarter inch. It's pretty thick, probably an overkill for this. I would have preferred like an eighth inch, but this is what I had on hand, and it just has an adhesive back. If you don't have an adhesive back, you can apply wood glue or Elmer's glue on your wood piece and then set it down on top of the felt and then trim it. It's pretty self-explanatory. I went ahead and tried to highlight the ribs a little bit just to pull more attention to that and to the scapulas here and those different rhomboids and trapezius muscles going on through here. The lats highlighted a little bit, and some of these muscles for the lats move into the erector muscles. Of course, I left the cheeks here a little highlighted, but down in here I put some of the black shoe polish just to knock that back to bring more richness visually to the surface quality. The highlights across the hair and the toes, so I just went down the middle of the shin a little bit with a little touch up of the bronze, and then I touched on top of the toes a little bit. I think I did knock them back because I wanted to incorporate the piece as a whole aesthetically. I left this darkness on the base move into her feet, so then this almost looks like one piece, and then the bronze trickling in is where there's this co-mingling of the two patinas and homogenizes the whole thing. This is a walnut, I believe it's a black walnut base, prefabricated. You can order those through Taxidermy Supplies, and they will charge you. There's a little bit of the patina green in here. The face, I really tried to drive the black shoe polish into the crevices of the mouth, the nose, and the eyes. I really wanted those to be filled because there's nothing worse than seeing little white pieces from the plaster and that effect. Inside the hands, darker in these recesses, took some bronze highlight on here, and then I knocked a lot of it back, a lot of it back. But overall, I think it has a very lovely quality. She almost looks like the James Bond, Dr. No, when Bond found the gal all covered with gold paint. Anyway, so this is Andromeda with a dark bronze patina.