So I’ve wanted to make an address plaque for our house for quite awhile. We are at 1511 but often our packages go down the street to an unoccupied house at 1517 - pain in the butt.
After doing some research, I settled on an art nouveau theme I liked and fonts that were legible enough, and made this out of MDF. The wings were cut around the perimeter and engraved in each cell. The dragonfly and letters were glued to an uncut piece of MDF, along with a double-walled “border.” There were then a few rounds of painting with reactive copper metal coating, and spraying with a couple different patinas… and then repainting by hand the “highest points” (aka body of the dragonfly) to bring out the contrast between the patina’ed and un-patina’ed copper. Pretty happy with how it turned out!
A side note: initially I tried to cut out the wing cells but it was just too much, and they burned to a crisp in the process because of how detailed the design is, so I re-did with a deep engrave. It took longer, but the end result is much sturdier.
Each of those raised “lines” I had to go over again with copper after the patina had set. That was the most time-consuming part of this whole process. The overall size is basically a full 11"x19"
Oh not at all! SculptNouveau makes the primer, metal coating and patinas I use, and I order them from this place:
My youngest sister is with an historical preservation architecture firm in Los Angeles, and they use these same products (I found that out later after telling her she should check them out).
The manufacturer’s YouTube videos are very informative: