results

Here are the results of my patina experiments.  I wish the picture had turned out a little better.  The middle pieces of metal are a very deep royal blue.  Very pretty.  There’s a lot of flexibility with this patina because salt added to the metal can cause different shades of the blues and apparently can cause some swirling.  I didn’t get any swirling but I think I added too much salt anyway. 
The pine and the potato chips both turned the metals green.  According to the book the potato chips should have turned them blackish so not really sure what happened there.  There are subtle differences though, the two made different patterns on the metal.  Where the pine shavings touched the metal there was not a color change, this caused a cool contrast in the colors.  In the picture its a little hard to see this, this is b/c the metals were left out overnight to air dry and it was foggy, well the fog condensed on the metal which smeared the patina a bit. The potato chip patina is does not have much of a pattern to it, more like splashes of green.  The cool thing about this patina is that its sparkly, if you look closely it looks like little bits of glitter attached to it.
I guess I should have mentioned this first, but at the bottom of the pic are pieces of the brass and metal before any patinas are applied.  Also the B indicates the metal is Brass, and the C stands for Copper.  They reacted very similarly.
Now the tricky part of patinas is getting them to stay on.  Patinas are achieved by oxidizing the metal, this is a natural chemical reaction sped up by me.  Because all metal is slowly oxidizing based on it’s environment it’s near impossible to stop the process.  It is possible to slow down the process, so that will be the next step to research.

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