Today was copper. For the record, copper leaf was not ever used in medieval manuscripts to my knowledge. It's not period or authentic... it just happens to look cool. So if you're trying to recreate a medieval page, don't use copper.
On the other hand, they didn't stick stones onto book pages either, so, I mean, it's not like I'm pretending to be very authentic here.
Still! If you've seen my blog posts before, you know that I love gilding. If you're following along on this scroll for the first time, well, you know now.
Here are the steps:
1. Paint something sticky onto your page. For flat gilding, I use Mona Lisa adhesive. You can get it at Michael's, or you used to be able to at least, for about five dollars a bottle.
Warning: Use only one dedicated brush for this stuff, wash it well with soapy warm water, and be prepared to ruin the brush anyway. As far as I know, the people who make this adhesive do not make a solvent to get it out of brushes. This is not helpful. I've tried several options; nothing works.
But whatever. On to step 2.
Apply shiny metal leaf to your sticky. Mona Lisa only needs about five minutes to dry to a shiny, clear, very tacky finish.
Sticking leaf to it is easy. I prefer to use "patent" leaf, which is adhered to a paper backing with static electricity, rather than "loose", which has no backing and has to be handled with tweezers.
My patent copper looks like this:
These sheets are considerably larger than the sheets you get of gold, silver, or any other metal. But they're still the same in that they come in books of 25 sheets...
And you just lift a sheet out and lay it on top of the sticky, press down gently, then lift away the sheet. You'll get areas that look like this:
And that brings us to step 3: brush the excess leaf away with a dry, clean, soft bristle brush.
Don't use this brush for anything else. It doesn't have to be high quality, since you're sometimes using it to scrub away at excess leaf. But it does need to be soft, and above all very very clean.
Scrubbing away the excess makes a sparkly mess! Leaf is very lightweight, which means the stuff gets everywhere. In your hair. On your phone. Attached to your clothing. It's like the world's most expensive body glitter.
Technically, those three steps are all you need. You have just gilded a thing. But there is a step 4, which is cleanup. You have to get all that glitter off your page and out of the way.
Personally, I like to save the scraps. If they're large enough, you can use them to patch bare spots where your sticky didn't stick the first time, or to gild smaller areas that don't need you to handle a full size sheet. You can also use the scraps to make shell gold, or I've donated them to friends who work with glass and they've made glass beads with copper and gold mixed in so it looks like it's floating inside the glass.
Swing by a restaurant and ask for a couple of sauce cups with lids, like they put salad dressing in.
Brush the excess glitter into a container, or pour it out off the page, or both. Snap a lid on. Done.
And with all the glitter finally (mostly) out of the way, you'll be left with a page that looks like this:
Not too shabby. I did have to patch a couple of areas when I first got started, because I was applying the adhesive too lightly. You don't want to go overboard with this stuff, but you don't need to dry brush it on either. But the patches came out okay and you can't even really tell where they are, so I'm counting it as a win.
I still have one last area to flat gild with the white gold, and that will be the four corners where the amethysts will go. But other than that, flat gilding is finished, and I'm ready to move on to the raised gilding next. That step will be more complicated, because gold likes to stick to things you don't want it to, like other metals, painted areas, and so on. (That's actually why you gild first before painting.) So it'll be a challenge to keep the gold off of the copper. Fingers crossed, knock wood, etc., I hope I'll be able to pull it off.
I also chose to flat gild first because I couldn't have to worry about the three dimensional obstacle of having raised gilding in my way as I worked on the flat. Hopefully that will make sense as you look at later stages of the scroll's development.
As always, feel free to leave comments or ask questions!
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