Dictionarium polygraphicum. Of japanning metals with gum-water.

Dictionarium Polygraphicum:
Or, The Whole Body of Arts Regularly Digested.
Vol II.
London: Printed for C. Hitch and C. Davis in Pater-noster Row, and S. Austen in St. Paul's Church Yard. MDCCXXXV.
1735
You are to take notice, that it is only to be done with these colours, which have a body; not with transparent colours.

1. Take gum-water, put it into a muscle. Shell, with which mix so much of your metal or colour, as may make it neither too thick nor too thin, but that it may run fine and smooth from the pencil.

2. Mix no more at a time than is sufficient for your present use; for they will spoil by being kept mixt.

3. And for your colours, your shells must be often shifted and changed; for otherwise the colours and gums will become knobby, thick, and out of order.

4. Having prepar'd and well-mixt your metals and colours, lay on your design with a hog's-brush pencil, with a smooth and even hand, drawing the pencil on the side of the shell, that it may not be overcharg'd with the colour or metal, when you are about to draw small lines or strokes.

5. But where you draw broad things, as leaves or other large works, then you may charge your pencil-full, but yet not so as to drop.

6. Now here it is to be noted;
- 1. That the practice of gum-water is useless and unnecessary in the use of gold iize.
- 2. That your gum-work being thoroughly dry'd, you are to run it over 8 or 10 times with your fine seed-lac varnish, or best white varnish; and afterwards polish it and clear it.

7. The black or ground on which your draught is to be made, when clear'd up, will be sq glossy, as if it were greasy, so that the metal or colour will not easily stick on; and for this reason you ought to rub it with a Tripoli cloth, and suffer it to dry; and so will the draught of the pencil be smooth, and stick on as you would have it.

8. If your work with gum-water should not succeed to your satisfaction, as not being even and regular, or the lines at a true distance, (as it may sometimes happen to young beginners) you may with the Tripoli cloth wipe out all, or any part of that, which you think unhandsome, or unfit to stand, and then immediately make a new draught.

9. And so by this method you may mend, alter, add, take from, blot out, change, and varioutly contribute to your design, 'till the whole piece is as perfect as you would have it.