As I noted in previous posts, I was encouraged by my Laurel to “start small” and create items that have meaning to me or to a recipient who is known to me. I love the bestiary books…the thought of scribes drawing beasts — some mythical; some real — to provide allegories for the populace. (Too, I am amused by some pictures where you can just tell that the poor illustrator has NO idea what this animal is supposed to look like, and they are going off of a description provided by someone fairly inept at providing any kind of accurate description.)
The following are progression photos…how I created it with the exemplar adjacent…
It was this with this effort that I realized that gold mica paint is fine, but I wanted to be able to create those little circles and dots from the original…which could be done with gilding by making impressions on the substrate under the gold to create a 3-D pattern. I had taken a class at Pennsic on gilding at a vendor’s booth. It was one of the hottest years that most folks could recall (my first), and humid. Needless to say, it was frustrating and seemed amazingly fussy and time-consuming for the poor effort that we got. Looking back, it could not have been done under much poorer trying conditions for this than if Titivillus himself had created it. Not that this is simple to do, but this seemed impossible, which is why I looked to other methods for my gold bling.
Philomene’s Scriptorium 