"reversed" Antiquing

[huffdad]

I did this by accident and the people I'm making belts for wanted it as their finished look, so I thought I would share in case anyone else wanted to have a go at it. I did not search to see if this topic has been covered in another post. I use neatsfoot & beeswax as my preferred finish. When I was first trying to get the classic Sheridan style resist, I wanted to know if it could be accomplished with my homemade finish. For the record, it cannot. One really needs an acrylic or lacquer to properly resist, but on to the topic at hand.

I assume you would need a wax based finish that must be melted in for this to work properly. Apply a thorough coat of finish to the project. Allow it to completely cool before buffing. You want to have puddles of hardened wax in all of your impressions and beveling. Buff it lightly so as to shine the surface but not so much that you remove wax from the low spots. Now apply your antique in the manner that you normally would. Afterwards, apply another coat of wax based finish. This time, buff it well while the wax is still wet and/or soft. For the second wax application, you want to completely eliminate those puddles of excess wax. Continue your project as you normally would from here.

You can see the end result in the photo of sample pieces. Instead of a hard line where the acrylic would resist, it is a soft gradual blended effect with darkened high spot and lightened low spot. It's somewhat of a pain to accomplish, but I like the effect. Hopefully I explained well enough for someone to duplicate, if they chose to try it.