The Framers Forum

Hi everyone,

Has anyone had any experience finishing a frame in bronze?

I am trying to achieve a smooth bronze finish on a bare wood moulding. So far I have tried guilding with metal leaf and using an antique bronzing liquid. It's fairly effective, but if you use it too much it goes blue very easily and the finish isn't very even.

Does anyone know how I can build up a smooth even finish like in the images attached?

Thanks

First up, the underlying surface of the wood must be marble smooth. So that needs a few coats of RSG gesso and sanded back to a finest finish. Then a coat of red bole, or red oxide acrylic paint well thinned ( no brush marks). Then two good coats of clear shellac.
After that it's best to use a 3 hour oil gold size. This gives a better finish than the water based acrylic size. Then you can go on the Gold Leaf Supplies web site and look for Variergated Loose Metal Leaf. They should have the shade you're looking for.

Hi Dermot,

That’s really helpful, thanks.

Have you, or has anyone else had any experience with powdered resin metals for finishing frames?

Thanks

I bought quite a lot of different bronzing powders so time ago, before I realised that I probably had bought a lifetimes supply of quite a comprehensive range of colours. The colours included both bronze and oxidiised bronze. A lot of these work best in water mixed with sodium silicated, which stops futire oxidation and blackening, but this is not the whole storey. Bronzes created with bronzing powders tend to not always look exactly as you were expecting. Dull looking bronzes are what you see quite ofter on door handles of old buildings, but not everybody wants that same look on a picture frame. A modification of the mix might be called for to brighten things up a bit, but the question is how exactly to go about doing this, without changing the colour so that it's no longer a bronze.

I have mixed bronze with silver bronzing powder with makes it a bit brighter and even added a bit of antique gold, but getting the ratios in the mix is really difficult. It's much easier when you need to only mix two different bronzing powders to get the shade that you want, but only two different bronzing powders is often not enough and just wishful thinking. Don't necessarily expect to get it right first time, so only mix small amounts at first, just to get a feel for what you are doing. Unfortunately, the more colours of bronzing powders you add to the mix, the more muddy it can look and you run the risk of throwing away what you have mixed. Base coat undertones and final glazes, over tints and washes will hopefully fine tune things a little, but getting the right look is not easy and bigger companies have access to technology which us mere mortals can only dream of.

Unfortunately, experience is the key to making much of this work and experience takes time. I wish I could offer you some sure fire key to success, but finding the magic formula is not necessarily the answer, because not everything relies on a magic formula and if you find it once, it does not necessarily mean that it gets any easier next time around. I don't go out of my way to create bronze finishes, but instead I use the bronze coloured bronzing powders as a means of toning down brighter bronzing powders which is a whole lot easier. I've not done this, but I'm wondering what would happen if I tried to create a bronze finish by toning down a gold, by progressively adding some bronze to the mix. As I've already indicated, I don't know if this would work, but maybe it would work.