Part four of six: SNC Crystals

English Transcription of Video:

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix, and today we're continuing on with our new Silver Antiquing series. We're going to be working with SNC Crystals today. If you haven't been following along with the series, we have been going over the different antique and compounds that we carry. In our first video, we talked about the basic process of creating an antique mirror and we used Baso Powder. Then we went into LS Gel and PFC, and here we are with SNC. So like in all of our videos, we're working with our six inch square single strength glass. We find this is a really good size of glass to test out different techniques, and for today's techniques we're going with two different styles, one with pouring silver and one with spray. Now, sometimes you can really interchange those processes and it doesn't necessarily matter, but with these particular techniques, I have found that you really can't create the same effect by swapping them. So the pouring technique really elevates the aspects of the pouring silver versus the spray silver, and that'll make sense as we go through the process. And without further ado, let's jump right into SNC crystals

Starting as we always do with cleaning, making sure that glass is completely chemically clean with both our powder cleaner as well as our serum oxide. At this point, we're just using regular tap water for the cleaning. Then we're going to move on to our tray and rinse off that tap water with our distilled water. And for the first process, we're using pouring silver, so we're going to be pouring our tin for silver here on the glass and allowing that to deposit for the 30 seconds, as we usually do, once 30 seconds have elapsed, I'm going to rinse that off, making sure any excess tin has been rinsed off of the glass. 
Once I've got this fully rinsed off, I'm going to go straight in with my SNCC crystals here I'm just sprinkling them on with a gloved hand. You can use that or you can use one of our spoons that comes from the new silver Antiguan kit and sprinkling a light amount on the surface and then allowing this to deposit for about three minutes. You can mist the surface as I'm doing here with my distilled water in my misting bottle, and that helps to dissolve the SNC crystals a bit while I'm allowing those crystals to sit on the surface. I want to get my pouring silver chemicals ready, as always, equal portions of each of the three chemicals put into my cup. 
You can see the SNC crystals are still sitting there on the glass. I'm going to combine my chemicals and then pour them right over the top on the glass, over the top of the SNC crystals, and you can already see that it's having an effect. That dark color is not something that you would necessarily get in that way. With a traditional pouring silver, that SNC is already starting to disrupt the silver, so I've allowed that silver to deposit for the full five minutes, leaving it completely uninterrupted. Now I want to rinse it off and really make sure that any of those crystals have been rinsed off well. I don't want them to be able to continue to work on my piece. They've done their job and you can see that they've really had an effect on the silver. There's a very thin dark layer of silver at this point because of how dramatically the SNC chemically interacted with the silver deposition process. 
So I am going to go ahead and apply another layer of pouring silver, same amount, same equal portions of my pouring silver solutions, and also allowing this to deposit for five minutes without rocking and moving, really allowing the ripples in the sand technique to happen, which is what will happen if you do not rock the glass when you're doing the pouring silver process. After five minutes, again, I'm rinsing it, and then I'm going to go for a third time with our pouring silver. These multiple layers are going to give me some nice layers of effect, some depth there, counteract how strongly this SNC was affecting that first silver layer. So once have allowed, once again, the five minutes for the silver to deposit, rinse it off really well and allow it to dry. Here you can see this is the silvered side and this is the glass side, and there's really some nice dramatic effects there.
Moving right along to our spray process. Once again, rinsing the glass after the cleaning. This is just to rinse off that tap water, and as we are doing this spray process, I'm going to be spraying it with our sensitizer. Sensitizer is actually very similar to tin for silver. They function the same, they're interchangeable, and I'm allowing that to deposit for 30 seconds as well. Once I've given that sensitizer 30 seconds to deposit in my glass, I need to rinse it off really well, making sure any excess sensitizers have been rinsed off of the glass, and I'm going to do what's called a flash silver layer. I'm just applying a small amount of our spray silver chemicals and just allowing it to deposit for a short amount of time. And then I'm going to move right into my SNC crystals. That's that spoon that I mentioned earlier, one of the spoons from our new silver antiquing kit and sprinkling it directly over the silver.
You can see the SNC is already starting to dissolve a little bit in that silver, so already it's giving us a different effect than what we had with the pouring silver technique. And you can of course decide how much you apply. The more SNC you apply, the more dramatic your results will be, the more interrupted the silver will be. I'm going to allow this to deposit on the glass, leaving it as is for about three minutes. After that time has passed, I need to now rinse off those SNC crystals. Once again, really focusing and make sure I get them all off. You can see that pesky area in the bottom right. Really want to take any SNC off so it's not continuing to act on the silver whenever possible. I do recommend that you take a look at what the glass side looks like because it's often going to be quite different than what you see on the silver side. 
I can see here I want more silver, so I'm going to spray some more weight spray some more check until I feel like it's really done as much silvering as I want it to do, and then I'm going to rinse it off, make sure any of that excess silver has been removed and allow it to fully dry. You can see here on the silvered side how different it is and really comes through. Actually on the glass side you can see there's some blues and even purples that come through with any mirror. We do need to paint it, so I'm going to paint it here with the black mirror backing paint. Once that paint is fully dried, then I can go ahead and worry about cleaning up that glass side of the mirror.

Here we have our two beautifully antique mirrors that we made with SNC crystals. Now we really like how these techniques really demonstrate the differences that you can get by changing up a few things. So when I look at the mirror with the pouring silver technique, I really see how it emphasizes the ripples in the sand that you can only get with the pouring silver. And then our spray silver technique really amplifies the colors that you can get within the antiquing process. There's a lot of beautiful variation, and that all comes down to how the crystals are degrading the silver and interrupting the silver as it's depositing. We didn't add any kind of special coloring to it. That's not really something that you can actually do, but we pulled all those colors out just through the process of antiquing itself. So for our next technique, in our next video, we're going to be working with THR Crystals, so definitely want to check that one out. I do recommend that you subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on the notification so that you're notified of that next video. If you have any questions about this process or any other antiquing or mirroring questions you may have, you can certainly leave those in the comments below or you can send us an email and check out our website AngelGilding.com