Homemade patina recipes?

? When you say "typical household products" I assume you mean fruit juices and generic chemicals like vinegar ⇦in bulk on eBay or Amazon [affil links] and bleach and ammonia? I'd avoid proprietary household cleaners: the problem is you won't know what is in them or why, and they can change at any time the manufacturer decides.

Can you start us off with a patina that you have discovered so we can get the flavor of what you're talking about? What color does it generate and what metal does it work on? Thanks!

A. Hi Joe

I work with copper and use salt, vinegar and cloudy ammonia to produce different patinas. You can spray your item with vinegar, sprinkle it with salt and put it in a sealed container with a dish of cloudy ammonia overnight. Next day, rinse the salt mixture off, allow to dry and you should have a blue patina on a dark background. I also bury pieces in sawdust dampened with vinegar, this gives an interesting effect but less colourful. Tim McCreight's book "The Complete Metalsmith".
has some other patina recipes using common ingredients.

Best of luck!

A. Hi, John. These days you can buy liver of sulfur as a reasonably dilute liquid ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] , and it is possible that it may have less baggage than the stuff you remember. But it may also be possible to use crushed hard boiled eggs as a source of sulfur dioxide, although obviously the reaction with metal is far less controlled.

If you type "blacken copper" into our search engine you will see a dozen or more threads on ways to darken copper. Good luck.

Regards,

A. OK. I'm giving up a trade secret but here goes. This is for copper or alloy plate. Do this outside as it emits chloramine. After cleaning your copper or copper alloy, immerse in household bleach with no dilution for 4+ hours. There are many variations at this point. With about 1/4 inch of bleach above the piece drop a few milliliters of one or all of the following solutions directly above various locations on the plate: nitric acid (try different concentrations but 20% works well), citric acid (1 gram/10 ml water), ferric chloride, 20%, phosphoric acid (use the degreaser from auto parts stores 100%. Any acidic solution of pH 3 or lower will work. Vinegar or lemon juice works. Let sit for 1 hour and remove piece and rinse gently with cool water. Remove any thick blue precipitate buildup by shaking in a tray. If this doesn't remove the buildup, try spraying with water. Allow to dry but don't expose to sun. Produces nice outerspace effects. Spray with lacquer after a day or so. Glossy is my preference.

A. If you want to make a patina, get a scrap piece of copper and place it in perlite, that's the stuff you place in soil to let the soil have more air. Place a small amount of acid, I use sulfuric or hydrochloric acid. Get the media damp, it's almost dry to the touch. place copper in. In 1 or 2 days the copper will be covered in green patina .It will be like paint.Scrape that patina off and collect and repeat. Let it dry and you will have green powder you can add water or urethane and you have paint on patina.