Deciding on Materials for my Woodburner Hearth Back Panels.
I had been wanting to create a decorative finish for my heat panels that back the hearth behind the woodburner in my caravan. The heat panels themselves are made of calcium silicate board which has a soft powdery finish. I needed to seal this with PVA before doing anything to cover it. Originally I had thought of doing mosaic as the final decorative finish – it was an obvious choice especially as I have a large ceramic tile underneath the wood burner. There was one big problem with doing a mosaic though and that is the weight of all that glass and ceramic. Tesserae can get really heavy and weight consideration is something to take very seriously in caravans – you don’t want to add extra weight to have to be towed and stress out the axles. The other issue with mosaic in a moving vehicle is that the grout can crack. Using flexible grout is an option but even so. Although probably not a massive problem, it is something to be aware of. So what were the alternatives? It had to be something that could withstand heat – sometimes a LOT of heat. Health and safety warnings about wood burners state that no combustible material should be within 50 centimetres as an absolute minimum. My wall panels are pretty close to the wood burner. So it had to be robust. What about metal tiles? Or something similiar? I’d seen some vintage copper panels – you know the kind of kitschy thing you get in charity shops. Usually a picture of a horse pulling a plough or a man with a beer tankard. I’d even thought about trying to buy quite a few and creating a sort of collage but dismissed that idea when a) I couldn’t find any that I really liked enough to have to sit there staring at them ever after and b) they weren’t that cheap. I’d seen some “tin” embossed tiles on Etsy and thought about buying enough to cover the whole area but I didn’t really want a repeat pattern; no, it had to be something a bit more free flowing.
So then I stumbled across the art of foil embossing on YouTube. After looking at a few videos I thought this has got to be the answer as it looked easy to work and easy to cut and fold. One issue remained, copper is expensive. Then I found out that you can get thick aluminium foil that looks like copper. Not only that, it was possible to colour aluminium to be any shade you liked as long as you used compatible ink/paint. I checked the melting temperature of aluminium to make sure that the radiant heat from the woodburner wouldn’t melt it. It was quite high, so we were ok with that.
Tools and Materials
At this point I did think about cutting up a ton of aluminium cans as they come in all sorts of colours but quickly dismissed this idea as a pain in the arse as the surface area would be really small, and gathering and cutting up loads of cans would add so much labour onto what would prove to be a very labour intensive project. So finally, after realising that embossing foil is sold in very small and expensive sheets to crafters, I found Parkdale Products who sell the foil in rolls several metres long and I was able to buy it wholesale, saving me a lot of money. Phew!! Thank you Parkdale!!
Inks
I already had a few bottles of Tim Holz Adirondack alcohol inks which I’d been experimenting with on plastic sequins to create my own shades. I quickly realised that the alcohol inks, didn’t go very far so I scoured eBay for someone selling a job lot and got lots of bottles much cheaper than the usual retail price. I did have to supplement them with some extras though, especially blue, green and yellow. The transparency of these inks looks lovely on foil, a bit like watercolours. I also tried the metallic inks but they didn’t look good and just ended up being a muddy mess, so I’m saving them for something else.
Tools
You can get lots of fancy tools and templates for embossing. I did buy a couple of embossing tools but actually didn’t really use them much. The thing that ended up being the most useful was the empty case of an old plastic propelling pencil. It had a smallish rounded end that was perfect for scoring the embossing lines. The only other things I needed were a bit of cardboard to press the foil down onto while embossing, a sharpie for drawing the design on the back of the foil and some paper and tracing paper for my design. I am sure there are fancier ways of doing it but I just followed a really basic process.
The Design Process
I had first thought of doing a Phoenix rising from the ashes but ending up with a vague idea of doing a waterside meadow scene. Don’t ask me why? What has that got to do with fire and woodburners? Nothing! But it looks pretty and that is all that matters. I wanted something that would look nice from different angles as the hearth panels create a corner and so different parts of the design can be glimpsed from behind the woodburner and stove pipe.
I started out the design process by taping up a load of paper in place and just drawing loose ideas on it. The design did take on a few iterations as I went along and got larger and larger with some overlaps to try to hide the parts where the foil panels joined up. As well as covering some mistakes!
Samples
Like all good textile artists, I believe heavily in samples before wasting vast expanses of expensive materials. And foil embossing was no exception. My first sample was on a piece of aluminium foil coloured on one side to look like copper. I had a go at “doodling” on it just for fun and liked what I saw. Once I’d got the foil from Parkdale, I sacrificed a whole piece to a larger sample of a fish and embossed and painted it with the inks. I then varnished it and held it near the gas hob for a while to see if it would discolour or, heaven forbid, set on fire. It did neither so I was satisfied that my material choices were sound ones. I wasn’t really used to painting with the inks and they are extremely unpredictable but that is all part of the fun. I didn’t really like the fish as such but I’ve kept it as a reminder of the process. Foil embossing is a bit like other permanent media, once you have set your lines down you are pretty much committed and have to accept that as part of the process. I felt like I went a bit mad with the circle pattern all over it. This was created with the end of a marker pen lid and was quite an effective stamp. You can get creative with it and use all kind of household objects as mark making tools. The only thing you have to watch is that they are not too sharp so they don’t pierce the foil (unless that is what you want of course).
Tracing the Designs
I then started to draw out my design sections on thick tracing paper. I reused some parts of the design in several places but moved the placement at different angles so it would look natural. For example with the umbel heads pictured. I then placed the tracing paper on the back of the foil remembering to turn the design over as it would end up being reversed when it’s turned over – something to remember if you ever do embossed foil lettering! I had to write “back” and “top” on it to stop my brain from getting confused. I then traced through the tracing paper with the high-tech propelling pencil tool. Then I turned the foil over to the front side and traced around each and every line to make it “pop” out ever more. Sometimes I added texture in the bits in between the lines. It was all a bit of an experiment and lots of trial and error.
I started getting used to what level of detail was possible with the tool and the thickness of foil. I’m sure there are ways to do finer lines with better tools but that was a rabbit hole I wasn’t willing to go down at the time. I just kept going with what I had, as my design was going to be seen from a distance so lots of fine details would probably be lost. Sometimes I found this a bit frustrating because I naturally love little tiny details and I felt that some of the smaller images such as the butterflies lacked detail. But hey ho, onwards! As I was tracing designs I had to decide whether to cut the panels in long continuous lengths or separate them out. Separating them in to smaller sections made it easer to handle the delicate foil. As it were the pieces were very long and bent and dented easily. I had to use a long off-cut of hardboard to support each piece as I worked on it. Some pieces were cut and shaped individually and then stuck across the main panels. This made them much easier to work on. But it also created another problem of lots of sharp edges and corners that needed sticking down which proved very tricky indeed especially the beaks of the birds, and the feathery edges of the umbel flower heads and so on. But more on that later.
Using Alcohol Inks
It was really fun creating the lines and seeing the design take shape. It’s a really satisfying process. The colouring part with the alcohol inks was even more fun. As mentioned these inks are extremely liquid, ephemeral and dry very very fast. They act almost like watercolours, blending and merging colours but also not like watercolours. When one area of ink is put next to another one they can repel each other and draw the colour away from where you want it to go. Adding more ink on top can cause that to happen too. So it was an extremely experimental and haphazard process but a completely enjoyable one. I tried using a brush to put the ink on with but that didn’t really work. I found cotton Q-tips much better to work with as well as just pouring the ink on, spattering with an old toothbrush, splashing and dripping it, and tipping the foil around. Blending and mixing colours on the actual foil worked well but I did mix up some greens in small plastic shot glasses to make sure I had enough of a certain shade. I had to use these mixes straight away before they evaporated in the summer heat. It’s an immediate type of medium, no waiting around here!
I also used some cotton wool pads to move the ink around and lift it off from areas with rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol) which can be used as a blender. Sometimes I found it hard to predict the colour shades as the inks look very dark in the bottle but much lighter and more translucent once on the foil. I did really love the parts where the inks have blended and created watercoloury blooms. On some parts I used sharpie markers too, to delineate areas and add a bit more definition. Some colours of markers worked better than others. The blues seemed more successful, pinks and yellows less so. Perhaps this has to do with the kind of pigments they contain. I did go back and re-ink some areas that looked a bit pale.
As the design developed I added more pieces that overlapped including some water birds such as a Great Crested Grebe, a Black-tailed Godwit, two Kingfishers and some waterside flowers. To cover up nasty sharp edges I had to add some remedial pieces of umbel leaves and flowers and yellow flag flowers.
Adhering the panels
I researched the type of adhesive to use to stick the foil to the heat boards. It needed to be something that would stand the heat and be easy to use. I opted for Vitcas heat resistant tile adhesive – the type of thing you can use for sticking tiles around fire places. It comes in tubes that fit a caulking gun. The adhesive had the texture of thick butter icing and was quite gritty. It was fine on large areas of foil but it didn’t go very far and I used a lot more of it than I had originally planned. On smaller pieces, and parts where there were very sharp thin shapes such as the beaks of birds and tips of leaves, it was very tricky to apply and got really messy. It dried pretty fast too, maybe because I was using it in hot weather. There was a very small window before it dried and more had to be applied making the pieces very thick and difficult to stick down. Some glue squeezed out under the edges and needed a lot of cleaning up which in turn pulled the colour off the foil around it. Which then required ink re-touching. Ugh!
In hindsight, I think I would try a thinner glue and maybe even Weldbond (which is my “go to” adhesive for mosaic work). I did try to find out Weldbond’s heat resistance parameters, but gave up in the end as I just couldn’t get a definitive answer on it. If anyone has tried it around a fireplace, do comment and let me know your results. The final step to finishing off was to varnish the whole area to seal the inks. I used Krylon Crystal Clear Varnish which is suitable for metal. It hasn’t discoloured so far, so that is good!
Update: A year and a half on – some of the extra parts that were stuck on to cover edges have peeled off – I think this is probably because there wasn’t enough glue on them. So I may just stick them back on with Weldbond and see what happens.
