The Framers Forum

I’m taking another look at gilding, I never quite find time to get to grips with it but hopefully this time….
I came across this frame from the Batican website and was wondering how the relief area was applied and with what? I can cut the flourishes with my CNC but would like to get the raised effect.

That's almost certainly not done with a CNC router, or a CMC mount cutter. My guess would be that in has been stencil on, or rubbers stamped on and while the paint is still wet it has been dusted with thermographing power, then after the paint has dried the suplus thermographing powder in shaken off and the remaining thermographic powder is the fused in place using heat. I've tried similar things myself, but making a really good stencil is not necessarily all that easy. At the tail end of second day of my hand finishing course, we added some raised ancient greek letters on to a frame moulding using the same technique.

Ricky did a video of the course and it was on his video! The Youtube id for this video was Am8KPGtpdb8, but I can't access it, as youtube won't let me in. Perhaps someone else can get into it!

I finally managed to run Ricky's Youtube video. The stenciled and raised ancient greek letters are on the very last shot and the end of the video, it's only there for a few seconds, so you will need to be fast hitting the pause button!

The process is called Pastiglia.
You can do it in several ways, but the traditional method is to use well sieved whiting mixed into an egg white binder. It should be like piping iceing onto a cake. Either use a piping funnel, a squeezy bottle or even a medical syringe.
It appears that the gilded pasta in your photo has been burnished, so the binder would definitely have been egg white. Otherwise you could try using diluted PVA. It's the bulk of whiting that creates the relief.
Feel free to message me about any gilding traumas.
Will help if I can.

Hi Dermot,

This sounds not easy to do! Do you mark out the design on to the surface first? If so how and how do you control how much of the applied mixture flows on to each part of the design, It all sounds very skillful and difficult to me! I doubt if I would have enough manual dexterity after the degree to which my stroke has affected me, so if I wanted to do this I would probably get a stencil produced by a stencil manufacturer and hope that this would produce a satisfactory result.

Thanks for the info Dermot.

Here is a link to the wiki Page about Pastiglia. Time for some background reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiglia