I have seen a while ago a picture of a brooch that was constructed from a gradient color alloy, white-yellow.
The ideea stuck to my mind and recently I have started to research this kind of alloy, but no luck.
I have found pieces by Gio Carbone, Adam Neeley and Niessing, made in alloys that have gradient colors, but there is no information on where to start learning about them, or just a pointer in the right direction for further experiments.
Does anyone have any ideea what is the path to follow to eventually reach such an alloy?
I am not asking for recipies, full info or anything like that. I know that the people who made them have spent a lot of time doing expensive experiments, so i am not asking for a tutorial, or something like that. Just ideas, so I can have a starting point in my research.
It’s not a single alloy. That gradient color change was made by fusing together many layers of gold starting with the most yellow and going to the whitest. It’s a very costly technique to make to gather together all of the different alloys as well as very labor intensive.
It looks beautiful and I applaud the tenacity, expertise, and time it took to figure it out.
Adam Neeley learned this technique when he studied in Italy. If you look at how to do gradient shading in polymer clay, the technique is the same - a real pain and a fabulous look.
Judy H
Thank you! So it’s basically made of multiple alloys of different colors, soldered or fused together and than rolled to the required thickness. Most likely fused to withstand further rolling, drawing or other forging.
I am guessing a mix of 4 to 5 different alloys should do the trick, starting with 75Au & 25Pd and gradually reducing Pd content and replacing with silver and then silver and copper, when reaching the more intense yellow tones.
I will try alloying a batch of 5 different colors, draw them to 2mm square bar, fuse them together and put the stock through the rolling mill… and see what happens.
The trick will be the different melting points of the alloys, so this could be a problem… maybe some zinc additions to the white gold mix would help, but I don’t have zinc, or the know how to calculate the resulting melting point after zinc additions
