Let me just say this. DIFFICULT! but also exciting and fun. Gold leaf is a real challenge as it is extremely thin pounded out gold. It is so thin that if you lift a piece, the slightest disturbance in the air can crumple the piece and ruin it. The process is fairly involved. I won't go through the process here as there are many good books and web sites that lay out the process, but below you will see a few photos of the process/progress of the gilded painting that I have created.
Hopefully this will be the first with more to come. I already have a few ideas but you will all have to wait for those to come to fruition.
Here is the panel with the clay bole and the head roughed in. The bole is the red that surrounds the head and is the base of color for the gold.
Preparing to stick the gold on. The gold leaf is 23k 1.5" x 1.5" pieces. Usually gold pieces are 3.5" x 3.5" but since the painting is small and the area to be gilded is small, I didn't want to use the larger more standard size. An area is wet with "gilders liquor" and then the gold is placed in that wet spot. This is called "water gilding". The gilders liquor is a mixture of water, rabbit skin glue (or another size) and alcohol.
This shows a great progression from the first piece of gold that I laid down
to the 6th piece as I was getting the hang of it. The gold is extremely fragile.
Here is the piece mostly covered in the gold.
Here is the piece completely covered. At this point I let the gold sit for 24 hrs. At that point, I filled the holes where the gold didn't adhere and then waited another 24hrs. Then wiped off the excess gold and then burnished (shined) the gold using an agate burnisher.
Below is the painting finished still sitting on the easel. The red bole, shows through the gold which gives the gold a rich warm color.
