Part six of six: Whiting

English Transcription of Video:

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix, and today we are completing our New Silver Antiquing Series. We are going to be working with Whiting, which is an inert powder. So what that means is that the whiting isn't actually chemically interfering or interrupting the silver. It's physically blocking the silver from deposit. So this is one of those products that you really just can't get similar results in the commercial mirror antiquing process because it's dependent on its ability to interrupt the silver while it's depositing on the glass. So we have two different techniques we're going to be working with today, working with our standard six inch single strength glass, and both of the processes we're going to be going through today are with pouring silver. Now, we know that there's certainly ways that you could integrate this with the spray silver process. However, because the whiting is interrupting the silver, it really helps that the pouring silver sits on the glass for that three to five minutes. It means that it's just gently sitting there and depositing coming out of solution onto the glass. Whereas with spray silver, of course the force of the spray could interrupt the whiting, and so it would give you a different effect. But as always, as we always say, these are just inspiration points. Certainly let your creativity be your guide, but without further ado, let's jump right into Whiting.

As we always do, we're going to start off our process of mirroring with cleaning the glass. What we're doing is chemically cleaning it. That's a very important step in the mirroring process is making sure your piece is completely clean. We're doing this with powdered glass cleaner, and then we're going to go behind it with the Cerium Oxide. The Cerium Oxide is an additional polishing process, and you can see that we're polishing that glass with our maple felt polisher. Now with the Cerium Oxide, we do need to physically wipe that off the surface, so I'm just doing that here with a nice soft sponge, making sure any Cerium Oxide that's left on the surface has been wiped off. Then we'll go straight into the rinsing. This is always going to be done with our distilled water. We're going to be using distilled water throughout. Here's our tin for silver. It looks a bit cloudy here, but trust me, it is clear that's just how the lighting is making it look there, but we're going to allow that to deposit as we always do for 30 seconds while gently rocking the surface. And then once again, rinsing it off with our distilled water. You want to make sure that you really rinse the piece off while to get all of that excess tin for silver off of the glass.
For our first process here, we are going to be sprinkling the whiting directly over the tin surface before there's been any silvering. So just sprinkling a pretty generous amount. You'll notice with whiting we go through more product than we do with some other antiquing products, and that's because it's going to be acting as a physical barrier. It's not chemically interacting with the silver. Now I've got my combined pouring silver chemicals that I'm pouring over the surface, and you can see that they're appearing cloudy, and that's because of the whiting that's on the glass. And I'm going to leave it here without rocking allowing it to fully deposit for five minutes. 
After the five minutes is complete, I will go ahead, rinse off the glass. I want to make sure while I'm rinsing that I get any of that residual whiting off of the glass that can interrupt the paint's ability to adhere properly to the glass. So I want to rinse that off really well. You can see here where it had an effect, and we're going to go straight onto our second process. So this is another piece. We're using Whiting in a slightly different way, but of course, starting with our rinse of distilled water, we are going to tin the surface as we did before, the regular tin for silver, rocking the glass and allowing that to deposit for 30 seconds. 
Once that tin has deposited for the 30 seconds, we're rinsing it off really well with our distilled water, making sure any excess tin is off. And here we've poured on our pouring silver chemicals. Now we're rocking it gently for 30 seconds, and then we're going to go in with the whiting. So you can see the glass is already darkened, the silver's starting to act and the whiting is being sprinkled on top. So already you can see how it's going to be different because it's sitting in with the chemicals. And once again, we're going to allow this to fully deposit. We'll knock on the rock the glass, just stand by for the three to five minutes, allowing it to fully deposit on the glass as it's sitting there. Once the five minutes have passed, we'll go ahead and rinse it off as we did before, making sure to get every last bit of white off there. Now, once this piece is rinsed, it's a good time to inspect the glass, see if you like the antiquing effect, see if there's any residual antiquing powders there. You can always layer effects if you'd like. We have more information about that in our instructions. As I turn it over here, you can see

What's the front surface. Some of that silver inevitably will creep over, but as you can see, because it wasn't properly deposited, that can be wiped right off. And our last stage is always is going to be protecting our work. So we're doing that with our black mirror back in the paint. Here. I'm using our foam brush with some of our antiquing effects. You do want to be very mindful about how you're applying the paint. With the whiting, it's not as sensitive, so you can certainly use a foam brush or a roller or you can spray on the paint making sure it's fully covered. 
Here we have our finished antique mirrors that we made with Whiting. Now Whiting is really interesting to me because it is an inert powder, which means it wasn't chemically interrupting or interacting with the silver, but physically blocking it. And even still it had quite a dramatic effect. So we can see here on our piece that we used Whiting before the silvering process. It's got a more dramatic effect. We've got some areas where there's barely any silver development at all. And so that's where we're seeing that black mirror backing paint come through. And this effect really also emphasizes what we call ripples in the sand, which is what happens when you pour the silver solutions on a piece of glass and then don't rock it. So as you recall, we weren't rocking this during the silvering process, and that means that the silver was depositing in ridges. 
However, of course, those ridges were also being interrupted by the whiting. So there's a lot of movement and flow. And another thing that's interesting about this particular piece is that you can see there is actually some kind of imperfection in the glass itself that wasn't actually visible before we were doing the cleaning, but is now made visible and emphasized by the silver. That's what that circle appearance is. So it's pretty unusual or rare, but it can happen and it gives another nice unique effect to the piece. Now here with our other piece where we sprinkled in the whitening during the silvering process, you can see it's a much gentler effect. It gives a bit more of a modeled gray appearance. It is still very reflective and gentle, and we do see a little bit of the ripples in the sand, but not nearly as much because the silver had been allowed to deposit in its normal process for a little bit before we interrupted it with Whiting.
So this concludes our new silver antiquing series with Whiting. We hope that you've enjoyed the series, have learned some things about the different products that we carry and have been inspired to create your own pieces. If you have any questions about this process or any of the other processes we've covered as part of this series, you can certainly leave those in the comment box below or you can reach out via the contact us page on our website. We look forward to continuing to provide videos for you. If you have any questions or suggestions about future videos, always let us know. We'd love to hear from you in regards to that. And be sure to check out our website. AngelGilding.com