Part two of six: LS Gel

English Transcription of Video:

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix, and today is part two of our new silver antiquing series. Today we're going to be delving into using LS Gel and LS Gel is found in our new silver antigen kit and there is also a designated kit for LS Gel and you'll see how we use those components in just a little bit. LS Gel is something that you would always want to dilute. So we've got the designated products for that. And as you may recall, if you've seen our part one, we did go into more detail then about the process of creating an antique mirror, the differences between a new silver antique mirror and a commercial mirror. So we won't get into that today, but certainly I recommend that you take a look at that video. There's a lot of good information at the beginning of that video in regards to all of those processes, so I'll be sure to link that down below.

Today we are going to be making four different mirrors. So I've got the same six inch plate glass here, single strength, and we are doing four because there's four different ways that we found that you can work with LS Gel. Two of our pieces are going to be made with spray silver and two with pouring silver. So you've got some variety there. And of course, all of these are suggestions when it comes to the way to apply it, the amount of time to apply it, that's certainly up to you. And so you can really play around with this a bit to get an effect slightly different than maybe what we do today. Now, LS Gel is one of our more aggressive antiquing compounds. So if you're looking for a layered effect and you want it to do more than one antiquing compound, this is one that I would recommend that you start with because you always want to go with your more aggressive ones first and then your more gentle ones later to make sure you're kind of building on your effect and not getting something real nice and gentle and then being too aggressive later on and stripping all of the silver.

So some things to keep in mind, and of course anytime you're creating your own antique mirrors, we really recommend that you take some good notes about what you're doing, any changes in the standard process, the amount of time things are depositing and such so that you can make sure that you can recreate the effect that you like most later on. But like I said, we'll be going through spray silver and pouring silver. We're not going to get into the details today about how the actual silvering process works. We do have a lot of other videos that go into more detail in those, and you can see those on our YouTube channel as well as on our website. But without further ado, let's jump into the LS Gel antiquing process.

We're going to start off as we always do with cleaning. Cleaning is a really important step in any mirroring process, but especially with this because we want to make sure that the imperfections, the antiquing effect that we get in the silver is because of what we're intentionally doing. And it's not that some piece wasn't cleaned well enough because of course that wouldn't really be able to be reproduced. Now we want to prepare our l s gel. So we've got our water here in the bottle and then we are going to be adding in the l s gel concentrate. Now you're going to see here that I am using our 15 mil spoon to scoop out the l s gel and then mix it in with that distilled water. This is not something that you have to be extremely precise with. You can see that we're not worrying about specific milliliters or anything like that, but more or less using a spoonful here in with our distilled water.

Once again, distilled water is a way that we're controlling variables. We know that that is clear clean water without any other kind of minerals and things in it that would affect the silvering. Once we've got our LS Gel ready, we're going to move right onto the mirroring. So I'm rinsing off my piece, spraying on my sensitizer and allowing that to deposit. We're going to start off first with the spray silver. So once that sensitizer has been depositing for 30 seconds, we rinse it off really well, making sure all that excess sensitizer has been rinsed off. And our first technique here is going to be LS Gel on dry silver. So I'm just silvering the piece. Once it's silvered the way I want it and it's got a nice even silver finish, I'm going to rinse it off and then allow the silver to dry completely.

Once that's dry, I spritz it with the LS Gel and then I'm going to dry that full surface here with just a regular hair dryer and that gives it a real nice effect. You can see here this is the exposed silver side. See all that color that developed? And that was just from our LS Gel. And you can see the other side, the front surface is very different. We're going to continue on with spray silver for the next piece. This one, we are not going to allow to dry first, so once it's silvered, we're going to move right into the LS Gel. We are going to just spritz it the same way we did before. Always a good idea to test those spray bottles spritzing the LS Gel over the surface and then we're not going to dry it with a hair dryer. We're actually going to allow that to dry flat.

So just by that one modification you can see that the effect is quite different and that LS Gel was actually even more aggressive on this piece. And you can see that it's really given a translucency to the silver in this piece. Now we are going to be doing pouring silver. So once again, another clean piece of glass pouring on the tin for silver and the tin for silver of course needs its 30 seconds to deposit. And I am going to rock the glass while the tin for silver is depositing, make sure it's an even consistent finish of the tin for silver and then rinsing that off.

Once my piece is all rinsed, I'm going to do using these really handy mech bottles here, measuring out each of my pouring silver solutions, mixing them together. And then once they're nicely combined there, we are going to go ahead and pour it onto the glass. Now you'll see I am not rocking the glass as you typically would in pouring silver. I'm going to set the timer and just allow it to deposit. Its five minutes. I'm not rocking it. And that's going to give us what we call a ripples in the sand effect, something that is really shown in elevated by the l s gel. So this is version one, as you can see, just traditional silvering. Once I spray on the LS Gel, you can see the ripples in the sand kind of starting to come through. And then it becomes really evident when I take that same blow dryer and then I dry the surface.

So I'm moving it along. And you can see here, especially when I turn the piece over, how the ripples in the sand come through. Those lines are because of how the silver was depositing. And then the LS Gel is antiquing on those ridges. Really nice interesting effect here. And of course each side is quite different. This piece, I did exactly the same except the tin is twice as concentrated. So that's not something you would typically do. Of course you would use the regular concentration, but by doing the extra strength tin and then the pouring silver and not allowing that to deposit, it emphasizes the ripples in the sand of those ridges that we see with the silver. And then the l s gel is going to emphasize that even more. So what we're seeing here is just by making this one change with the tin for silver and otherwise doing everything else the same, we're going to get yet again another effect. So blow drying it the same way as we did with the first version with pouring silver.

And here's that effect of course, this is the silvered side. You can see all that color variation that LS Gel gives us, and then we've got the front surface where that ripples in the sand are even more evident. So this is really nice effect just by changing up that one thing with the tin silver. Certainly a fun way to try it out With these pieces, I decided because there's so much difference and because there's so much fun color there, that it really is nice to be able to see that. So I'm just using our clear spray lacquer to protect the silver, and this way you can really enjoy the piece on either side.

And that is using LS Gel to create your own antique mirror. As you saw, LS Gel has some really nice effects. It alters the color of the silver and certainly the front is going to be quite different than the back. And keep in mind the techniques that we went through today are just meant to serve as inspiration. Of course, there's a lot of different ways that you can use l s gel in your antiquing, and we certainly encourage you to try out different things and let us know what you find. Let us know which technique you like best and how you make it your own. We always love seeing pictures of finished pieces as well as works in progress. And if you have any questions about this process or any other process, you can leave those in the comment box below. Our next antiquing product will be PFC crystals. So we're going to continue our series with part three PFC crystals. So keep an eye out for that. I definitely recommend that you subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so that you're notified when that video comes out. And check out our website, AngelGilding.com. Thanks for stopping by!