Enhancing your decoy’s colour
Over the past few years Bruce Malcolm has become a great friend and valuable decoy teacher and historian. He directed me to his formula for safely enhancing the true colours of your decoy’s paint, especially when they look dried out. He had me use a blend of 20% linseed oil of a good quality from an art store and 80% turpentine (I used Turpenoid oderless, which is a turpentine substitute). I painted on this mixture and then clothed off any excess. The depth of colour on the decoys treated was markedly different, stronger and richer. The 20% factor I believe is the key, allowing the thinner blend of linseed to better penetrate the dried paint surface.
I would experiment on a decoy that has a faded paint surface and I don’t believe every decoy is a candidate for this process! The decoy partially visible above my Davern can pictured below may not be a suitable candidate due to the amount of paint loss!
The Davern drake canvasback pictured below was recently enhanced by this process.
Great info. Thanks for this post!