Mercury Glass Bird

I was out looking at Thrift Stores the other day when I came upon this bird.

I didn’t take more before pictures, so you can’t see that this little guy has a slight crack along his head. The color is a terra cota with a creamy wash over it. He needed an update and I wanted to try another attempt at the faux mercury glass technique.

First, I started off painting him silver. That’s actually when I noticed the crack.

Originally, I wasn’t going to worry about the crack and just foil over the bird just like I did with this pumpkin. After playing around with the foil, I decided that it ~~was going to take too long~~ didn’t show the detail on the bird like I wanted.

I reached back to my college memories when we used to fill our nail holes with toothpaste so we could get our deposit back and figured if it worked then, it might be a good fix for Mr. Bird.

The toothpaste worked great.

After filling the crack with the toothpaste and a very light sanding, I sprayed the bird with some ORB (Oil-Rubbed Bronze).

After that dried, I spritzed the bird with some water and then quickly sprayed on some silver.

Here’s what it looked like:

Look at those cute bubbles! I wasn’t sure if they would stay that way since some had burst rather quickly. I was hoping they would would pop as the water dried. I even tried to blow on them ~~and nearly passed out from the fumes and the blowing and what not.~~ It turns out that the bubbles will stay, but I wanted them to pop and show the ORB underneath.

I took a towel and rub off the bubbles and I got this:

I really love how this turned out. The textures are really fun, and you would think that I could just leave well enough alone. You’d be wrong. I ended up doing the whole process again. I missed a section with the water so there wasn’t any bubbles on the front of the bird. It had to be redone.

I love the texture this method produces. You get the burst bubbles and when I rubbed off the bubbles, I got this darkened tone in places. I’m not sure it really looks like mercurcy glass, but it’s a fun finish and I now have a bird in my home decor so I can’t get kicked out of the cool kid’s club. Whew! I was so worried about that.

Take a look at Mr. Bird in all his glory.