Crinkly/Textured silver foil

Hi everyone,

I hope your week is going well.

Does anyone know how to make silver foil on a copper base, have an extra crinkly/textured appearance? almost like its been scrunched into a ball and smoothed out? I plan on covering the whole copper base with silver foil for cloisonné. It’s a texture I’ve seen beneath the cloisonné of some beautiful pieces and I’d love to be able to do it. This is a snippet of what I mean:

image

I don’t know how but would like to know as well. What is the artist name that you have seen this on? I would like to go and take a look.

Hello
This could be a process known as silver reticulation. A series of annealing’s & quenching in water/pickle which ends bringing the pure silver to the surface and creating a wrinkle effect on your substrate. Usually a 80%ag/20%cu alloy works best but I have seen people use regular sterling sheet as well. You can you tube the process for more information and process.

Ken
DHF Inc.

I’ve messaged you @Poodlepup3 as I don’t know if I’m allowed to share peoples Instagram profiles here, although the ones I’ve seen are open to the public on Instagram.

I’m familiar with reticulation and this looks a bit different to that, although that could definitely be another way to achieve the effect! Thank you.

Foil reticulation is 2 sheets fused together.

I think your photo is the thicker Japanese foil, embossed or tooled.
Start with a fired liquid enamel base, then the textured foil, fire, and the enamel will fill the raised areas.
The finished project needs lots of layers of enamel.

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Thank you for your help @Betty2 It’s much appreciated.

Once I had the terminology (embossing foil) I was able to find some information in a book online. For anyone that’s interested the book is called, ‘The Art of Enameling: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration’ by Linda Darty (pages 80-84). It’s very thorough on the subject of silver and gold foil.

Thanks
Grace

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Just a note about Karen Cohen’s re-issue and updated The Art of Fine Enameling. It’s just out and has a very thorough coverage of gold and silver foils, including Ginbari foil, which permits foil to be embossed. It’s available on Amazon.

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That’s great! Thank you for sharing. I will definitely be ordering that :slight_smile: