Teapot Tarnish Science Video

The Process of Tarnish Video

This project came about as my family was preparing for a milestone birthday party at home. The number of guests invited caused my parents to take a closer look at the state of some of their possessions, including some silver stored away in a cabinet. I offered to help by cleaning up the pieces that had become severely tarnished over the last 20 years. As I was polishing away, I began to question why silver tarnishes to begin with? After some intense research, I found the answers I was looking for along with a new idea for a video!

Resulting are the assets I made to explain the tarnishing process.

The guilty teapots! Both were in a very sorry state when I got to them. The teapot on the left was polished quickly but before doing the pot on the right, I took some photos and video to illustrate just how much tarnish can change the appearance of objects. These teapots were also used as templates for illustrations, following.

To talk more about the tarnishing process, I went all the way back to the periodic table of elements. The two major elements at play in tarnishing are Silver (Ag) and Sulfur (S) so I made sure to highlight them with these cube illustrations:

To set up the teapot illustrations, I traced over photos of my real teapots in Illustrator then colored them in with Photoshop according to the state of the metals. The shorter/rounder teapot is tarnished. The tall teapot is cast in bronze before being silver-plated. I used the actual teapots as color references as well as google image searches, getting the right shine and color was quite a good challenge!

Turns out there are three main possibilities for at home tarnish cleaning: using silver wipes, using aluminum foil and an electrical charge, or regular washing with soap and water. I threw together some simple illustrations to help out with this (using real objects and photos as guidance).

At this point I also decided that white was too boring a background for my video and chose this nice sea-foam green color (a la Monet impressionism pallet) that I think pairs nicely with all the assets and kind of matches the green paint in the actual room the teapots are kept in (sort of visible in the pics at the top).