Would you feel better if I call it spicy gilding instead of... "more gilding"?

I bet you thought I was done talking about gilding, huh? You were mistaken.

Now that I've done the bulk of the gilding, it's time to spice it up a little. There are a few different techniques that can make gilded areas a little more interesting.

The first is called "sgraffito." To create this effect, you first gild a large patch by oil or water gilding. Then you apply a thin layer of shellac to protect the gold because it scratches very easily. Then you paint over the gold entirely. In this case, I'm painting it red because that is the color of her dress. Then, using a dull pointed instrument, you can scratch through the paint layer to reveal the gold underneath. this technique is often used to create the effect of fine patterns on fabric, as I've done so here.

On her hat (?), I used a technique called "intaglio." As you can see, I pressed down the gilding with a dull point so that it left an impression, but didn't scratch all the way through the gold.

On the sidebars, I used the easiest (although maybe not totally authentic to the Renaissance) technique - painting the gold on. Instead of using a regular pigment to make my tempera paint, I used mica powder (which looks like gold). If they even did use this technique during the Renaissance, I bet they would have used real gold. However, gold leaf is hard to grind up into a really fine dust because it's already so thin that it just sticks to everything.