What is a good crafting metal to imitate gold, or possibly be spray painted gold?

Question

What is a good crafting metal to imitate gold, or possibly be spray painted gold? has to be easily accessible and bought in small quantities. I need the specific material to start up a Custom pendant service online, for jewellery etc.

I looked so far at tin,stainless steel, brass but not sure if their easy to work with and accessible. If there's any specific tools you might reccommend then that would help too.

Answer 1

Part of which materials would be "best" would depend on exactly what you want it to do, and what you want the final pieces to look like.

The "metal clays" (Precious Metal Clay, e.g.) mentioned before are one possibility, but they're fairly expensive and must be cured at a fairly high temperature with special equipment.

Actual polymer clays (Premo, Fimo, Sculpey, Kato, Cernit, etc. are some brands) can be baked in a home oven (or other creative ways), and they can be shaped any way you want then be made quite "gold" using various materials --and in various ways (...this is done for making polymer clay jewelry a lot!):

...real-metal powders
...imitation gold leaf (those two will look very shiny gold) & gold foil
...gold mica powder
...gold acrylic** paint (those two give a pearlier gold)
...metallic waxes

**non-acrylic paints shouldn't be generally be used on polymer clay because the solvents can eat into it *over time*, leaving the clay sticky or even dissolved... some acrylic paints will evenn have that type of solvent in their propellant which can have the same eventual effect

These materials can be applied before or after baking the clay depending on which you use and how you want to use it. The powders can also be turned into "paint" by mixing them into clear acrylic mediums of various kinds.

There are a number of pages at my polymer clay website that have loads of info on all those things. To check them out, just go to the Table of Contents page,
http://glassattic.com/polymer/contents.htm
...then click on the following category pages from the alphabetical navigation bar on the left side of the page:

Powders & Waxes
Leaf & Foil
Paint (look under Acrylics)
Fauxs--many (click on Metals)


HTH,

Diane B.

Answer 2

at gold reef city South africa they have a place where you can pan for gold. Although they used copper and spray painted it gold>>>rip off artists but other than that although not cheap is silver. Spray painted gold would look and feel like gold

Answer 3

precious metal clay. You can find it on the web. It's moderately priced, comes in very small quantities. There is silver and god both. You just need a small kiln to fire it in. It handles like polymer clay, but you fire it, and put it in a tumbler to shine it. Check it out on the web. Oh, and you can press it in molds, too.

Answer 4

Did I miss something? You asked what would happen if you painted silk flowers gold. Then you asked if they would die. Silk flowers can't die. In my experience, it is fine to spray paint silk flowers. I don't know how real flowers would react.

Answer 5

Gold leaf is cheap, & easy to use. just used some from home depot on a faux chinese black laquer project. I cut to size and transferred with a wooden dowell. Hope this helps.