Bronzes

Do you need some statues to stand outside your museum? This tutorial will teach you how to paint something so that it looks like a real bronze statue. Museums often have large statues of famous people or animals like dinosaurs and bears outside their front doors. These statues can pay tribute to the museum’s founder, show tourists what kind of specimens are in the museum, or get visitors excited before they enter. Large statues are often made of metals like bronze, copper, or brass because these metals are so durable. Many hands on models inside museums are also made of bronze so that millions of visitors can touch an object without destroying it. When they are outside and exposed to weather, metal statues slowly form a patina, or a thin layer, of blueish green color called verdigris. This is why the Statue of Liberty is green. Can you imagine how awesome it must have looked when it was originally built in shiny copper before it was weathered?

What you’ll need:

Materials

The statue you want to bronze (old toys or clay models you make yourself are perfect for this)
Paint (black, green, blue, and gold or bronze colors)
Gesso
Paper towels

Tools

Paint brush

How to do it:

Find an old toy or make a clay sculpture of the animal or person you want to use for your statue. Mix together a lot of black paint and gesso and paint your entire statue black. The gesso will help the paint stick to smooth surfaces like plastic.

After the black paint has dried on your statue, use your metallic color to paint it entirely gold or bronze colored.

Now to add the verdigris weathering. Mix some blue and green paint together to get the right shade of verdigris. Find a statue near you that you can take pictures of for inspiration. Once you have the right color, add a couple large drops of water to the paint to thin it down and make what is called a wash.

Slather your watery verdigris wash over your statue, making sure to get in all the nooks and crannies. Then immediately take a paper towel and wipe off the verdigris so that only a little is left in the cracks of the statue. You can make your statue appear more weathered by adding more verdigris or less weathered by only adding a little. You might want to test this method on just a small section of your statue.