This year’s most fascinating project thus far was something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: a combination of vintage, hand-lettered signage, and a whole handful of silvering recipes I’ve had on the boil for years. I called up Mandy at Glass Art to make up the vinyl template for me, and I silvered the mirror back in March this year.
Because I wanted to push the distressing way past the norm, I decided to leave certain areas of the glass unpolished before I silvered. I also decided to etch the silver plate in a rather ham-fisted, blotchy fashion. The idea was to then re-silver these areas with an extremely thin coat of silver. To complete the torment, I used a combination of two backing paint colours: a deep chocolate, which I covered over with black.
The result is one of the most beautiful mirrors I’ve ever made. The hand-drawn lettering is absolutely magnificent in itself. While I take no credit for this, I still think I managed to make it look ever better. I love the scribed effect of the lettering against the ‘bright’ parts of the mirror, where the silver plate is most intact.
However, the real pleasure lies in the way the distressing works into the lettering. In the photo, you’ll see the subtle blushes and blooms of copper typical to most of my work. Into this are numerous, scabrous ‘oil spots’, scaly areas of silvering showing where I left the glass deliberately unpolished. In the etched areas, chocolate backing paint creeps across silvering like some bloom of organic material. Whitish foxing marks, where chlorides mar the silvering, mark the advance of the etch solution.
