Painted Mirror Tiles

Painted but not yet baked.

I am still working on the vampire doll project, but I knew that I was only going to make a small amount of progress on that project this week so I said that I would be blogging about a different project this post.  The Thursday blog post will be back to the vampire doll project.  Today I am blogging about one of my "what if" projects.  A "what if" project" generally means I am experimenting with a medium in a way that it might not normally be used just to see what happens.  Sometimes good things happen and I have found a new way to incorporate something into my art work.  Other times things don't really work out.  It is just fun to see what happens.  The joy is in the experiment, not tied to the outcome.

Thinner paint puddled in the center.

So today's experiment is on using bake in the oven enamel glass paints on mirror tiles.  Will the paints work on mirror tiles?  Will baking the tiles wreck the silvered backing?  How does the paint look on the tiles?  Will the painted tiles hold up over time in outside conditions?  I want to know, therefore I experiment.  I actually have a reason for wanting to know it the mirror tiles can be painted different colors.  I will get into that later in the post.  For now, I'll just leave it at the direction of a couple of future project depends on what I find out in this experiment.

For this experiment I used various glass paints that I had left over from previous projects.  The paints were Pebeo Porcelaine 150, Pebeo Vitrea 160, and Liquitex Glossies acrylic enamel paint.  The instructions for these paints are primarily  the same except for some variations in temperature.  Basically, you clean your glass with alcohol to remove oils and fingerprints.  Paint the glass.  Let the objects dry for 24 hours, then bake them at the recommended temperature.  The Pebeo Porcelaine 150 called for 300 degrees Fahrenheit (150C).  The other two paint types called for 350 degrees Fahrenheit ((160 C).  The paints say they can be baked in a domestic oven.  However, I sometimes paint on things that might not be all that great in my home oven, so I use a dedicated toaster oven for my projects.  In this case the toaster oven worked well.  On some materials, the toaster oven tends to over-bake the item.

Baked green tiles.

The mirror tiles were purchased at my local craft store.  They came ten to a package.  Since I am experimenting, I just bought a couple of packages and painted only one package of ten.  I would say that in the future, I will be hunting for a better source of mirror tiles.  In the package I opened, twenty percent of the tiles were not cut perfectly round.  They had jagged edges on them where a cut was missed.  That may not be so much of a problem on a mosaic project where the edges are covered with grout, but on a clothing project a jagged piece could cause an injury.

Baked gold tiles.

I guess that lead in brings me to my two future projects.  I recently was given the instructions for the stitch used to sew mirror tiles on clothing.  Now that I have finished my embroidered jacket, I was thinking of embellishing another jacket with some fabric and mirror tiles.  So I was thinking, what if mirror tiles could be tinted different colors to add jewel tones to the jacket?  What colors and paints would work best?  And that is the beginning of my experiment.

Another project is a mosaic gazing ball.  Of course, the mirror ball has been done.  And I would not really want a mirror ball in my garden because I do not want to be blinded every time I look in that direction.  I have used transparent stained glass on the gazing balls, but do not get the glow that I am looking for from it.  The opaque stained glass does reflect light as I want, but it is pretty expensive.  If I wanted just a few highlights of glowing glass here and there, was there something I could do that would not necessitate buying an expensive piece of glass?  Maybe painted mirror tiles are the thing.

Blue tiles (top left) are not very reflective.

So back to the experiment.  My limited experience with glass paint is that if it is not thinned to the right consistency the paint is streaky.  This paint was pretty old and thick.  I did not have any of the recommended paint thinner for the Pebeo paint.  Even after it was stirred, the paint went on in thick streaks.  For this experiment, I was perfectly okay with that.  The streaks add character.  (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)  The Liquitex paint could be thinned with water, but it did not need it.  It was still quite fluid.  So fluid in fact that the paint flowed into the center of the mirror tiles.  Apparently those two tiles had a slightly concave curve to the glass.  Both paints had some air bubbles in it.  I painted the mirror tiles and left them to dry for forty-eight hours.  I did not have time to get to them at 24 hours.  At forty-eight hours the paint had plenty of time to dry, but I could scratch it off with my fingernail.  After baking, the paint was hardened and did not scratch when a fingernail was drawn across it.

I had been worried that the backing of the mirror tile might burn off during the baking process, but that did not happen.  The tiles survived intact and reflect the light well, at least on the tiles that are less opaque.  The streaky tiles are reflecting light in some spots and not reflecting as well in others.  It give the tiles a textured look.

I also found that the dark blue I used was very opaque and did not reflect much light.  The Pebeo green and gold colors looked better overall.  The thinner Liquitex paint did reflect light through the paint, which is really what I was looking for, although I may have a problem with coverage if many of the tiles turn out to have concave glass on them.    

So all in all, my experiment was a success as far as the glass part goes.  I attempted a couple of tries of sewing the tiles onto a piece of scrap fabric to show you what the tiles would look like.  However, that part of the project still needs a little work.  I finally realized that I needed a larger piece of fabric and an embroidery hoop if I was not going to make a complete mess of things.  So I don't have a finished sewn on tiles to show you.  Perhaps you will see one in a future project.

Next blog post I will be blogging about the progress of the Vampire doll.  Check back on Thursday.