Most of our patinas are solid colors all over a given vase or wallpiece part, but we have recently started doing more painterly styles of finish on our work by patinaing a base color over the whole piece, but then, instead of putting a second layer over the whole thing, brushing the second layer (and sometimes a third layer) only over part of the piece. This can be done in a careful pattern as we do with our square-in-square patinas (mostly on our wall clocks) or it can be done more organically.

One of the styles of more organic multi-color brushwork we call Tricolor. This uses the three colors of Black Ochre, but only the first layer – blue-green – covers the whole vase. It is followed by a layer of brown (to form the color we call Ochre) coming up near the top of the vase, and then a layer of black patina coming up not quite as far. Until this year, we only did this patina on the Smokestack vases, where it was probably the most common patina we sold. (The example shown on Artful Home has the brown all blended in under the black, so it looks almost like it’s just two colors.) But this January David decided to try putting the Tricolor patina on some other styles of vase, and the effects are stunning!

medium and extra-small round vases

We will be offering this now as a standard color on several types of vase.