Water gilding on glass.
So what’s all this about?
Well it's the process for sticking gold leaf to glass, the technical term is called gilding.
There are a number of conditions that need to be right for you to do this. The glass has to be clean, the surface tension of the glass needs to be removed and you need a liquid to transport the glue so that the gold, or other material will stick in place.
I always start off by sanding the glass edges. This is done with a diamond faced sanding block.
I sand all sides on both faces so that I don’t cut myself when I am handling the glass, which is a very easy thing to do, I know that from experience.
If you were just gilding the glass, then you could start from here, but in my case the stencilling, sand blasting and glue chipping all need to be done next, until we get to the good part.
The gilding solution is made up of some very disparate ingredients. First of all, we need the water, not just any water, it has to be deionised water, a highly purified water that has had almost all of the minerals removed from it. This is used as it will not contaminate the gold when applied.
Then we need gelatine, an animal by product usually used foods, medicine and cosmetics, but I use the food variety. This actually provides the glue to stick the gold to the glass when the water had either run off or evaporated.
And finally, we need something to remove the surface tension of the glass. When you apply the solution, sometimes called size, to the glass it needs to be able top run smoothly across the surface, and not retract into itself. It needs to fully coat the area of the glass where you have applied it, so as the gold goes on flat and has minimal creases. You can use isopropyl (neat alcohol) but I use washing up liquid.
So once the gelatine has dissolved in the deionised water, and the washing up liquid has been added, you are good to go.
And there you have it.