Posted by Mike Jackson on December 14, 2003
Occasionally, I thin out some old magazines, but usually flip through to see if there was anything I might want to clip out. I did that tonight with a June 2002 Sign Business and ran across a Gold/Vinyl article by Jerry Mathel.
The general idea as to cut and apply black vinyl in reverse, allowing for a black vinyl outline and a thin varnish line, with an extra black outline that was peeled off after the varnish set up. For the article, he water gilded aluminum letters, but suggested you could use real gold instead. The suggested back up was 50% Esoteric Back Up with 50% One Shot Black thinned as necessary with One Shot low temp reducer.
Okay, I am sure it must have worked because you see him holding the finished glass on the first page of the article, but I have some questions. First would you be concerned about getting a good gild next to the raised thickness of the black vinyl egde? Second, I have always been leary of long term effects of painting over vinyl with enamels. Fine gold back up was really a screen ink called Sericol, but it dries hard and does not necessarily have a lot of "heat" in the solvent. Maybe the additional clear varnish layer helps seal everything inside?
I'm not trying to pick on Jerry here, but more throwing this out on the table for additional comments.
Mike Jackson
Lee Littlewood
It seems to me the biggest problem is with the thickness of the vinyl. As you say, it's hard to get the gold into the little wet edge next to the vinyl (the meniscus, where the watersize sucks up from the glass to the height of the vinyl) and it takes a while to dry in there. Then it is really hard to burnish without catching your cotton or powderpuff on the vinyl and ripping the leaf. The few 'machine cut' gold jobs we've done have been for "Boston gilds", using lots of cut outlines on mask.
[Boston gild: mirror outlines and satin centers, done with one gild. Peel the centers, put in varnish; peel the outlines and brush in black. Peel everything so the paint edges 'heal' to a smooth edge, then next day watergild over all and backup, keeping within the paint outlines. Admittedly this requires some brush skill to keep inside the black outline, but not too much.] The one I'm thinking of was on curved glass so silkscreen wouldn't work.
I would think vinyl outlines and varnish centers - maybe for copper or aluminum or brass - would work, and there the little curvy meniscus edge would add a bit of dimensional flash.
Kent Smith
I
have had and heard of many failures using vinyl in this way. Neither the enamel nor the backing paint will adhere well to the vinyl and the thickness really presents some issues. Masked paint has the chance to level out some and the subsequent coats will roll over the paint when they will not change the hard edge of the vinyl.
Denver Chapter of the Letterheads