Mainly silver or silver oxide jewelry. What causes it to tarnish, and can I tarnish pieces intentionally in certain places?
Also, can I selectively remove the tarnish in specific places while leaving the rest of the piece unchanged?
And how do I prevent jewelry pieces from becoming more tarnished or soiled in other ways? (I guess I’m asking for how best to store individual pieces and clean pieces after wearing, if needed.)
Sulphur tarnishes silver to a nice black. You can use egg yolk to do it, along with more professional approaches. You could try masking bits off with tape or the like, it’s the sulphur oxide fumes that do the tarnishing.
The only way to really prevent tarnish is regular cleaning, there are various types of cleaners. Sealing (like with lacquer) doesn’t really work, the piece will tarnish anyway.
Then you can re-polish the raised parts to give it shiny highlights.
Don’t wrap silver in a rubber band if you don’t want it to tarnish (my brother packaged up my mother’s silver flatware, bundling each type in a rubber band, and that stained it horribly).
Which I guess could be extrapolated to say that you could put rubber against the bits you want to tarnish. I think it took a few weeks to occur.