An introduction to ways to antique a mirror you make yourself.

English Transcription of Video:

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix, and today we are kicking off our video series on new silver antiquing. Now there's a lot of different ways to make antique mirrors and we separate them into two main categories. We have what's called commercial mirror antiquing and new silver antiquing. Commercial mirror antiquing refers to the process of purchasing a commercially made mirror stripping the backing paint off, disrupting the silver layer that's there, and then reapplying that backing paint. What we're going to be doing today and throughout the series is what we call new silver antiquing, and that is creating your own end-to-end process of silvering. So you'll have a piece of clear glass, so you'll be applying the silver and then disrupting it either before, during, or after the silvering process to get your antique effect. As you can imagine when you are doing this full process, you have near infinite options to create an antique mirror, and we do have our new silver antique in kit and that includes the small quantities of each of our different antiquing compounds. 
And it's a great way to get started to experiment which processes you like best, which one gives you the effect that you're looking for. So I definitely encourage you to take a look at that. I'll leave a link to that kit in the description box below. And then I also wanted to talk about the process of antiquing. Creating antique mirrors is something that's really in trend right now. It's very popular and essentially what you're doing is recreating what time can do to a mirror. So a properly made silver mirror can last for decades and decades Over time, you may see that the silver starts to degrade and that's more likely on older mirrors where maybe the backing paint quality wasn't as good and things like that. So essentially antiquing is recreating or amplifying that effect without needing to do the time that it took for it to naturally antique. 
So what you're doing then is disrupting the silver layer so you can disrupt it before by maybe putting something on the glass to block the silver's ability to deposit on it. You can put something during the process, so that's going to block the silver's ability to evenly deposit into a perfect mirror, or you can do it after where that is actually eating away or working away at that silver layer. So throughout our video series, we will have one video for each of the antiquing products that we currently carry. For today, we're going to be talking about Baso powder. Before you get started on antiquing, there's a couple things are really important to keep in mind when you are doing the full new silver antiquing process. The best part and what can be the worst part is the fact that there's just a lot of variables.
You've got different types of glass, you've got the level that you've cleaned it, the amount of silver you've applied, the amount of antiquing, compound, the time. All of these different things are variables, and if you manipulate those in a controlled way and you take a lot of notes about what you've done, then you can create a wide range of effects. So you might be able to use one antique antiquing compound on a piece of mirror for two minutes and get a completely different effect if you put it on for five minutes. So when you are working with and aware of those variables and you're taking a lot of notes about what you did, then the options are endless. But if you don't take those notes and you're not very careful about that, what you can find is that you create a beautiful mirror but you don't know how you did it and you can't recreate it.
And that can be one of the most frustrating things for a mirror maker. So just keep that in mind. And of course, the type of glass that you use matters for all of our purposes in these videos, we're going to be using the six inch float glass single strength, but you can of course use all different types of glass, certainly like a restoration glass is a beautiful effect. You can even do this process on different colors of glass and give you all kinds of other techniques in that way. So without further ado, let's jump into the anti compound we're doing today, which is Baso powder. Keep in mind that we're really going to be focusing on basal powder. We're not going to get into the specifics of the mirroring. So we do have other videos and you can certainly take a look at those that talk about the more specifics of the actual silvering process.
And the majority of our techniques are going to be done using pouring silver. Pouring Silver does develop slower than spray silver. It takes about three to five minutes for pouring silver to develop, whereas spray silver can really develop within a minute. And so we're going to be manipulating that stretch of time a bit more, but you can do spray silver in your antiquing. You just might have to adjust your technique and of course make note if that's something that you did so you know which technique and which silver to use when you're recreating it. But let's go ahead and jump right into the basal powder technique.

So any good mirroring project is always going to start with cleaning, and we're using our cleaning powder here. And then our serum oxide, we sped this up a lot, but you really do want to take your time cleaning. Well then rinse it off and then we're pouring on our tin solution. Once again, we're not getting into the measurements and such, but I am going to allow that to deposit for 30 seconds. Rinse that off well with my distilled water. And then I'm going to move on to the silvering. For this process, we are going to be doing the pouring silver, so I'm measuring my chemicals there in my MEK bottles and then pouring them on the glass. And this is going to take about three to five minutes to deposit, and you'll see that we are going to utilize the process of pouring a bit later on.
So we've got our chemicals mixed here. We'll pour them onto the glass, and we're going to set our timer and allow that silver to deposit. Now for this process, we do want to rock the glass as we usually would pretty much rocking it throughout that timeframe of the three to five minutes so that it can fully deposit. And then once we have gotten the silver finish that we want, you can see that's a nice brilliant silver with the yellow coating of the excess chemicals. We're going to just tip those off. Now this piece, we are going to tip it off and rinse it well, and then we are going to tilt it and allow that piece to dry completely so that silver is going to be dry on the first piece of glass here on our next piece, you can see we skipped ahead. We went through the same process, but we have the silver now on the glass with the excess chemicals.
I'm not going to rinse that off. I'm going to leave that as is, and that's going to give me a different effect. So I'm taking my Baso powder. This is just going to be sprinkled in and you can see that it is somewhat kind of merging with the silver chemicals that are on there. And then I'm going to just allow that to sit on the surface. For this particular piece, I'm going to give it five minutes, and you can see over time that that Baso is going to kind of seep in to the excess chemicals there. I don't need to rock it, I don't need to move it. I'm just checking in on it Periodically, once I've gotten my five minutes, then I'll go ahead and tilt it and then rinse it. Now Baso powder is near insoluble, so you really do need to take your time and rinse that really well. 
Once you've gotten all of that rinse off, then you're good to go. You can see this is the front surface. I have some excess silver I'll need to clean up, but I can see I've got a really nice antique silver effect. So let's move on to that other piece. Remember, we allowed that silver to dry completely, and you can tell there's a difference already because that basal powder is just sitting on the glass. It doesn't have any water at this point to seep into or work with. So we're going to take our misting bottle with some distilled water and just mist it gently. That gives it just a little bit of water to work with, and we'll give a nice gentle effect there. Once again, we're allowing about five minutes, and you can see from this side of the glass there isn't as dramatic of a transformation. But after that five minutes is up, we will once again

Tilt the piece and then rinse it off. Really taking our time, making sure that we're rinsing that really well. We want to get all of the basal powder off. Once we've done that and the surface is dried, we're going to coat the backing. And we're doing that with our black near backing paint and doing it with both pieces of glass here. We want to make sure that you really fully protect that with a backing paint that will protect the silver because you don't want to have any unexpected or unpredictable antiquing later on. There you go. We're just going to allow them to dry completely.
Here we have our finished hand antique smears that we antique using our Baso powder. And I really like the effect. I think it's pretty straightforward, and I think that this is one of those antiquing effects that really mimics what would naturally happen over time with an older silver mirror. So I think that that can be a really nice look to go for. And I think those are really interesting. If you think about it, we use the same silvering chemicals, the same silvering process, all of that was pretty much the same. What we varied was the way in which we use the antiquing powder, and that's what gave us such different results. So certainly there's so many different options even within this one antiquing compound. And as I mentioned, this is the beginning of our series. So our next step, we're going to be delving into LS Gel, which is another one of our antiquing products. 
And there's a lot of different ways that you can use that one as well. And I think it's also really important to note when we're looking at these antique mirrors, that the way that they're looking now on their finished side, the way that you'll look at them when they're completed maybe installed, is very different than what you see on the other side where we were actually manipulating and applying that silver. So just keep that in mind that those two sides are going to be different. So you'll want to check in on that and make sure that you're making your final decision based off of the side. That will be your final side, typically this other side of the silver. So I think that this is a fun process to try. Like I said before, there's really endless options when it comes to making an antique mirror in this way. So if you have any questions about this process or any questions related to antique mirroring, anything like that, be sure to put those in the comment box below. I'll include links to all the different products that we use today, as well as our social media, Facebook, Instagram, and such. And be sure to subscribe to our channel so that you're notified when the next video comes out in the series. And check out our website, angel gilding.com. Thanks for stopping by.