The owners of this vessel understood it to be a rare ancient Etruscan vase with strong historical value. Though it is not typically done for historic pieces, they requested a seamless repair.
The vase was broken into many pieces, a large segment of the rim was missing, and it had old repairs that needed to be redone. In addition, simply painting to conceal the repair lines was not suitable if we were to insure the preservation of as much as possible of the original surface, therefore we had to implement a staining technique.
To apply staining with effective color and sheen matching, after cementing all the pieces, we used a tinted filler, mixing the filler with natural pigments, that had the same porosity performance as the vase's clay body. Once the filler cured and was sanded, we applied additional staining applications for color and color variation fine tuning to achieve a closer match. Finally, "aging" techniques were used for completion.
The same process is used for Pre-Columbian Indian Pottery and Chinese terracotta vessels / statues restoration.
