Yesterday I finished the flat gilding by adding white gold in the corners where the amethysts will eventually go.
After I did this, I was reminded of a unique quirk of gold leaf: it likes to stick to things. (For fun, here's a scrap stuck to the natural oils in my skin on my little finger.)
This is great when you're trying to get it to stick to itself, so you can lay down multiple layers and get a nice rich effect... less great when you want to avoid sticking it to, say, your copper and giving those areas a mottled finish:
Heck.
It's nearly impossible to scrape away just one layer of metal leaf. Once this has happened, you're pretty much stuck with it unless you decide to gild over the area again later.
Incidentally, this was a learning experience for me. I originally laid down the copper first because it was flat gilding, and I thought that flat gilding would go easier without any raised-gilded areas getting in the way. Instead I should have laid down the gold first, regardless of where and done the copper last, because copper will not stick to other metals.
Time for a workaround. I made some simple stencils, sort of, just windows in graph paper, the exact dimensions of the space I was going to gild, which would mask the copper and keep it from getting silver stuff all over it.
For raised gilding, I use Kölner miniatum, a sort of mustard color adhesive that dries slowly, but if done right, leaves a super smooth finish for the gold to rest on.
Incidentally, gilding interlacing is a bit tricky since you need to keep track of your "over and under" throughout. Here you can see the penciled in reminders I gave myself:
And here is the finished bird:
The knots were actually quite a bit easier to paint in:
So that was probably two hours of work, including cutting the stencils I was going to need later. Miniatum takes hours to dry, so I got to give myself a bit of a break in the middle of the work, and come back to this:
Everything that's painted here is going to get white gold. All the rest of the gilding will be yellow gold, and then whatever is left will be painted with actual colors.
The arrow was actually pretty easy, since it's not close to anything else. The birds, knots, and dragon are all going to be a bit more challenging, but that's what the stencil is for.
So, proceed as usual: apply sticky, let sticky dry, apply gold, brush off excess. The only difference is that I need to do the applying through a little window. No big deal.
Miniatum takes hours to dry, as I mentioned above, but if it dries too long, it will stop accepting gold at all. It also doesn't like a lot of heavy pressure applied to it when you lay the gold down. So there's always a risk of bare spots appearing once you brush the excess gold away, like this:
Annoying, but fixable. For bare spots, I actually really really like the Mona Lisa adhesive. You just paint carefully over your bare areas, let it dry for five minutes, if that, then come back and reapply your gold.
Remember how I mentioned that I like to save my gold scraps in a little container? Scraps are perfect for patching bare spots.
Problem solved. There were still a few places where a tiny bit of gold got onto the copper, but they were very small and most of them cleaned up with just a little brushing. The spots that are left are barely noticeable.
Next up is yellow gold, but I am going to have to wait a few days before I can start on that. I've got a couple other commitments I need to see to first, but the wait won't hurt the piece at all.
As always, your questions and comments are welcome!
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