Antique paintings are able not only to decorate the interior, but to give it a certain charm and charm. However, as a rule, unfortunately, not everyone can purchase a canvas of venerable age due to the high cost. You can make a picture yourself that looks visually older than your age. This will require a little patience and certain reagents.
Changing the temperature
You can age a painting by abruptly changing the temperature. To get the craquelure effect, place the canvas in a warm and dry place for a day. Then the painting needs to be kept in the cold for the same amount of time. The procedure should be carried out until the paint layer is covered with light cracks. To consolidate the result, apply a special varnish on top that imitates patina. Likewise, creation modern painting will take on a touch of noble antiquity.
As an alternative, you can use ordinary sandpaper to age paintings. The main thing is that it is fine-grained. To obtain small cracks and abrasions, she should rub the canvas with light circular movements. The results obtained are fixed with varnish.
Craquelure effect
If you don't want to bother with sandpaper or wait at least two days, use a varnish that creates a craquelure effect. By applying varnish, you will get the same cracks, but much faster - immediately after the varnish has dried. Professional decorators do not recommend completely treating the surface of the painting with varnish, but applying it selectively. This way you will be able to create a more believable antique. Before applying varnish, try it on any surface covered oil paint. This is necessary in order to have an idea of exactly how this reagent will behave. In addition, you should strictly follow the instructions.
Well, of course, you should understand that the effect of antiquity can only be created on a canvas painted with paints. You won't achieve anything with a paper illustration. Some artists age a painting during the process of painting it. They do this using regular varnish, however, they apply it before the paint is completely dry. Visually add antique charm to a painting painted watercolor paints can be done using boron powder. To do this, you need to apply it to the back side and leave it for some time. As you can see, it is not difficult to give a painting a touch of antiquity - the main thing is desire.
How easy it is to make a dial look aged.
All the beauty and charm of products using the decoupage technique lies in their age; napkins or cards appear as bright spots on the texture of the coating, the dark base peeks through new paint. Such places are usually called “damages”, “chips”, or “scratches”. This is achieved by waxing over dark paint before subsequent application of white, main.
This time we decorated a watch from the “Herbarium” series, popular in our workshop. The decor technology is similar to the box, but we used a stencil for the dial. The stencil was made to order and is reusable. And we will also make the dial with “proders”.
Now I'll show you how I achieved this.
The surface is ready for stencil work.
Apply the stencil.
Rub the numbers inside the wax candles.
Then we apply brown paint with a sponge.
We wait for the paint to dry and remove the stencil.
Now we take a rough sandpaper and scratch out the cracks, and the numbers become uneven, you can also sand their edges!
The watch is ready, all that remains is to coat it with varnish!
You will need
- - a piece of genuine leather;
- - sketch of the future product;
- - plywood stretching, small nails and a hammer;
- - razor blade, press, hard brush and emery;
- - spray bottle and water;
- - medical and ammonia alcohol;
- - glycerin;
- - Castor oil;
- - cotton wool and rags;
- - crackle varnish or leather paint;
- - sponge and brush;
- - salt.
- - shoe polish;
- - old iron;
- - oven;
- - wooden form;
- - marble powder.
Instructions
Think carefully appearance future product. Sometimes it is enough to simply knead the skin, stretch it well diagonally in different directions. With sandpaper you can make ready product more or less worn out certain places(for example, on the elbows or knees). For clarity, draw on paper a network of decorative creases and cracks, in some places you can even mark cuts.
To create an enhanced effect of antiquity on the leather, you will have to first prepare it, make it softer and more pliable. Wet the cut with water from a spray bottle, stretch it onto the plywood using nails and dry it in the sun.
Rub castor oil or glycerin into the surface of the leather. After the material has dried, wipe it with alcohol and begin to knead and create a thoughtful pattern of wrinkles. Scratches can be made with a stiff brush, and creases can be made with a press. Work carefully and slowly, because the process of creating artificially aged leather is irreversible!
Wipe down the aged material clean water, dry cloth and stretch dry it a second time. While the pores of the canvas are slightly moistened, soak them in castor oil and a small amount of ammonia. After fatliquoring, the material should dry and can be removed from the plywood. Knead the skin again so that the fat penetrates thoroughly between the collagen fibers.
To style a leather item, you can use a special patination agent for leather from a store for designers and artists. Read the information on the packaging carefully and follow the instructions exactly. The crackle composition turns a new product into a cracked one, as if from time.
Try leather dye, making the color of the item uneven, with darkening and discolored spots. This can be achieved by rubbing the surface with a sponge, brush and sandpaper, as well as using a combination different shades paints.
Finally, use the shoemaker's leather aging method. Take a brown piece and soak it in salted water (50 g per liter) for a day. After this, remove it from the container with the solution, let the liquid drain and wrap it in a soft rag to dry. The surface of the canvas should become a little wobbly.
Lubricate the leather with shoe polish and iron it at a temperature of 120 degrees, being careful not to burn the material. For these purposes, craftsmen specially keep an old iron on hand. When the shoe polish stops sticking to your hands, remove the remaining product using glycerin alcohol. You can prepare it yourself: mix glycerin and alcohol 2:1 and slightly heat the mixture in a water bath. As a result of your manipulations, the brown skin should turn black.
Stretch the dyed material onto the desired shape (for example, a log) and place it in the oven (120 degrees). After a strong appearance, remove the material and quickly dip it into a container with cold water. After two or three repeated procedures, the skin will become covered with intricate cracks, and cracks will appear in the seams between them. Brown color. For a worn effect, additionally treat the canvas with marble powder.
The process of aging leather using various paints and varnishes requires a certain skill. It is recommended to first test this or that product on a small sample of the material, and only then begin decorative processing of the rest of the fabric. Protect your hands from chemicals with rubber gloves and work in a ventilated area to avoid breathing harmful fumes.
Sources:
- How to age a leather jacket
Facial aging is a highly complex retouching performed by highly qualified specialists. But the program Adobe Photoshop allows you to make an old face in a simple way, accessible even to beginners.
You will need
- Tools: Adobe Photoshop CS2 or higher
Instructions
Save the result of your work (Shift+Ctrl+S).
Video on the topic
According to the story of the artist and historian of the Renaissance Giorgio Vasari, the sculpture of the brilliant Michelangelo “Sleeping Cupid” was buried in the ground, then dug up and passed off as an antique statue. The statue was recognized as truly antique and was sold to the Cardinal of San Giorgio Raffaello Riario for 200 ducats, which once again confirmed the exceptional skill of Michelangelo.
Modern fakes are not made to confirm the skill of their author. The price of the issue (from hundreds of thousands to several million dollars for a painting by a recognized genius) is such that one successful attempt at a forgery out of a hundred can immediately enrich the dodger. Therefore, along with the development of methods for assessing authenticity, to which all are necessarily subjected standing paintings, methods by which they can be circumvented are also rapidly developing.
For obvious reasons, the participants in this “race” - art critics, technologists and, of course, the authors of fakes themselves - are not looking for extra fame and are in no hurry to reveal their methods. For Popular Mechanics, a specialist from one of the leading Moscow laboratories made an exception by talking about the main methods of examining works of art.
First look
The study of any painting includes art historical and technological expertise. To establish authenticity, experts work in two main directions - determining the date of manufacture of the painting and searching for the creative and technological techniques used in it, characteristic of a particular artist. Everything is clear with the date - Raphael could not paint with paints invented in the middle of the 20th century. Dating information, experts say, can be contained in every part of the painting, and the arrangement classic masterpieces is not as simple as it seems at first glance.
The picture is painted on a base - it can be canvas, wood, metal, stone. A simple canvas already contains a dating element - with the spread of new types of looms, the quality of the canvas changed dramatically.
The artist covers the canvas with primer to make it smooth. The degree of smoothness and the number of layers of soil are determined by the fashion of very specific times. In cases where the primer can absorb the binder base of the paint (most paints are powdered pigment and a binder - for example, walnut or linseed oil), an insulating layer - imprimature - must be placed on it. A typical imprimatura is a thin layer of oil paint.
The first layer of the picture, related to painting itself, is the white underpainting. Whitewash is the optical basis of color, a kind of “illumination” from inside the picture. It is not visible to the viewer, but has great importance— the final colors are obtained by applying transparent paints to the underpainting. For example, when an artist paints a portrait, he first builds the shape of the face with a thick layer of white. Whitewash not only creates a beautiful optical effect, but also helps to save expensive pigment, much less of which is required for transparent paints.
The following layers create the visual content of the painting. They are painted with paints that contain more varnish than oil, and are therefore transparent. Technologists call these layers glazes. A varnish is placed on top of the glazing - a transparent protective layer.
For each of the layers described, there are research methods that indicate the date of manufacture of the painting. At the same time, experts face a lot of pitfalls. For example, a painting painted during the life of a great master does not necessarily belong to his pen. At a time when aesthetic value paintings were considered more collectible; a mass of copies came out of the workshops of geniuses, made by students and signed by the maestro himself. Finally, on the work of an unknown contemporary of the great artist, our contemporaries could simply forge a signature. Art historians carefully analyze the similarity of the painting being studied with famous works certain periods of the artist’s creativity, taking into account technical and stylistic devices, subject of work, details of the master’s biography. However, an atypical picture may turn out to be a “test of the pen” or a “joke of a genius”...
Unfortunately, absolutely accurate ways to determine the authenticity of a painting do not exist today and are not expected. Nevertheless, an experienced specialist, looking at the picture with the naked eye, can already tell a lot about it.
With the armed eye
When studying paintings, experts use several types of microscopes. A section of the painting, magnified 20-50 times, is a sight almost more beautiful than the painting itself. The canvas turns into a series of hills and depressions, glaze strokes take on the shape of sea waves, or mountain canyons. A binocular microscope is especially good, allowing you to look deep into the picture, feel the thickness and quality of the varnish and, of course, examine restoration interventions or defects. Reflected in broken cracks filled with dust long life a masterpiece or an attempt to age it artificially (by heating and sharply cooling).
It is useful to look at the author's signature through such a microscope. Washing and changing the signature is one of the simplest and at the same time effective ways fake paintings. A microscope can clearly see whether the signature lies under the varnish, above it, or “floats” between two varnish layers. The so-called “signature in the test”, which the artist put on the undried varnish, should be slightly recessed. The above-mentioned cracks in old varnish are called craquelure. If the signature lies on top of the cracks or flows into them, this is an indicator of a fake. Although the original signature could simply have been poorly outlined (as a rule, signatures are not restored).
Under a polarizing microscope (600x or more), the sample from the painting looks like a scattering of sparkling precious stones. These “gems” are nothing more than particles of pigment. The vast majority of pigments in classical painting They are minerals ground into powder. The type and combination of pigments gives the expert an idea not only about the date of production of the painting (different pigments were used in different time), but also about the individual “handwriting” of a particular artist: different masters obtained the same color shades by mixing different colors on the palette.
In invisible rays
One of the main tools of experts is ultraviolet, x-ray and infrared radiation. Ultraviolet rays make it possible to determine the aging of a varnish film - fresher varnish looks darker in ultraviolet light. In the light of a large laboratory ultraviolet lamp, the restored areas appear as darker spots (it is clear that paintings untouched by restorers are valued much higher than those completed) and artisanally rewritten signatures. True, this test is easy to bypass. Experienced restorers keep swabs that they use to remove the varnish before restoring lost areas of the canvas. Having subsequently washed these tampons in a solvent, they get... the same old varnish, identical to the original one. Currently, varnishes that do not darken in UV rays are even produced in series.
X-rays are blocked by the heaviest elements. In the human body this is bone tissue, but in a painting it is whitewash. The basis of white in most cases is lead; in the 19th century, zinc began to be used, and in the 20th century, titanium. All these are heavy metals. Ultimately, on film we get an image of a whitewash underpainting. Underpainting is the individual “handwriting” of the artist, an element of his own unique technology, part of the painting that he did for himself, and not for the customer. To analyze the underpainting, a database of X-ray photographs of paintings by great masters is used. Unfortunately, their publications play into the hands of not only experts.
Infrared rays, on the contrary, allow you to see another part of the spectrum of the picture. Experts use special thermal imagers that detect waves with a length exceeding 1000 nm. Infrared light reveals the underlying drawing made by the artist with black paint or pencil, or... the coordinate grid with which it was written exact copy original painting.
Chemical weapon
Chemical analysis in painting is divided into two categories: with sampling and without sampling. The study of the picture without sampling is carried out using an X-ray fluorescence analyzer (XRF). This device determines the metals contained in a substance. Metals are chromophores, that is, they are responsible for the color of certain substances, reflecting certain light waves(for example, lead - white, yellow, orange; copper - blue, green; iron - red, yellow).
A more accurate and detailed element-by-element analysis of a substance is provided by a micro-X-ray spectral analyzer, or microprobe. For the microprobe, a sample is taken from the painting. It is so small that it is not visible to the naked eye, but it contains parts of all layers of the picture. For each of them, the microprobe compiles a spectrum of the elemental composition of the substance. In addition, the microprobe can operate in electron microscope mode. For chemical analysis, methods such as emission spectral analysis, emission spectral X-ray phase analysis and many others are also used.
The chemical composition is extremely helpful information. To help experts, detailed reference books are published indicating the release dates of factory paints, varnishes, and primers made according to one or another recipe.
Currently, inorganic chemistry is at the service of experts. Paint binders, which are organic matter, all over the world began to practice relatively recently. Some advanced methods of organic chemistry that could be used in forensic examination already exist, but are at the disposal of the military, criminologists and academic institutions, which are in no hurry to share technologies with art historians. In the examination of paintings, methods of liquid and gas chromatography and IR spectroscopy are already used.
It so happened that experts were always in the lead in the “technology race”: manufacturers of counterfeits had to quickly respond to the emergence of new examination methods and try to circumvent them. Experts say: “If we manage to finally understand the organic chemistry of binders, then we have won for 50 years!”
This series is dedicated to materials with which you can “age” a product without using craquelure. There are now a great variety of them in decoupage and hobby stores. So,
1. Faceted (self-cracking) varnish.
Quite thick (like a paste), applied to the surface with a spatula, modeling knife or palette knife, 2 mm thick. Distributed evenly over the surface (around the motif). If applied with a sponge or brush, you will get a different (interesting) crack pattern.
It adheres well to all absorbent surfaces (wood, ceramics, cardboard); glass and plastic surfaces must be pre-treated with a glossy varnish. Available in various colors, drying time is 24 hours.
2. Microcraquelure faceted varnish - two-component.
Transparent, forming graceful cracks, which after drying can be shaded with powder or decorated stained glass paints or liquid bronze.
Suitable for any surface, but for good adhesion, the product must first be degreased and treated with a special primer varnish (step 1). After the primer has dried, the beveled varnish is applied in a layer of 1 mm. palette knife, spatula or brush. Drying time 6-12 hours.
3. Paraffin candle.
Creates abrasions that emphasize the aging of the product. The bottom layer of paint, after drying, is rubbed with a candle in places where there are supposed shabby areas. The top coat of paint in these areas will have weak adhesion. Apply a top (contrasting) layer of paint, dry it with sandpaper light movements We go through these places - the top paint will come off easily.
4. Unrefined liquid shellac.
Gives a tint of aging to treated surfaces and has a pronounced amber tint. The color (darkening) depends on the number of layers. Can be used as craquelure in combination with gum arabic.
5. Universal acrylic patina paint.
Gives the product an aged look and is used on various surfaces. Apply patina to the decorated object with a brush and remove excess with a soft cloth. If large surfaces are being treated, apply in parts.
The longer the patina remains on the product (not wiped off), the denser its layer. Can be used to fill craquelure cracks. After patination is complete, the product must be left to dry for 24 hours, then coated with a finishing varnish.
6. Bitumen wax. Also gives a hint of aging. Apply with a brush or cloth; after a while, remove excess with a dry cloth (not lint).
I have a part of the surface specially treated (for clarity). Potal ages very well - the gold darkens.
Since there were many questions on this topic, I decided to finish my series. I will be glad if it is useful to someone and helps someone navigate the great variety of materials being produced.
