What's a good process (assuming there is an effective process) for making steel armor appear bronze? I'm going purely for aesthetics — a way to distinguish/honor certain knights in a medieval era world. I'd like to mention the process during the story so the audience doesn't imagine the knights are outfitted in actual bronze armor. Here's what I found on Wikipedia: Is bronze-gilt a thing? Not gilt-bronze — which as far as I understand is gold over bronze — but a thin coating of bronze over another metal?
Gunsmiths sometimes colour steel bronze by "exposing the item to be bronzed to the concentrated fumes of a mixture of 50% Nitric acid and 50% Concentrated Hydrochloric Acid for a period of 3-5 minutes. Then the item is covered with a coat of petroleum Jelly (Vaseline) and heated until the petroleum jelly decomposes" medievally they wouldn't have had vaseline of course but if you assert that they used fat or pitch, or something its not likely that anyone would doubt you or be able to check
Thanks @big soft moose. It sounds a bit complicated but I might resort to it. After doing a little more research this morning I stumbled across shell gold. Per Wikipedia: And now I'm thinking a bronze paint made from bronze flakes/skewings might be a simple enough answer.
Processes they used to use in medieval times to color steel would have names like bluing, blacking, and browning. Browned steel would probably look very much like bronze, though there may well have been other methods, with different names, to make it shinier. I'm not sure how shiny browned steel would be. It probably depends mostly on how polished it is. These are simple chemical treatments applied to the surface after the object is fully crafted.
Just looked up images of browned steel and it does look like bronze, at least sometimes, Some of it looked more greenish. Here's one:
@Xoic That bronze on the rifle is a little darker than what I'm shooting for (hey, rifle pun ). I actually have a reference pic of the armor in question. I guess I should have included it in my original post.
That's just one picture, if you look it up it can look very different. I imagine on that one they were going for an antique look so did a lot of darkening to give that aged appearance. I've done some similar stuff—bought a bayonet and it looked brand new, but I wanted it to look old and worn, so I looked up methods for 'antiquing' metal. I ended up coating it with mustard for like 3 days and then did a bunch of other stuff to it. It darkened it significantly. If they hadn't done similar procedures to that gun hardware I suspect it would be a lot brighter.
