Gold leaf within oil painting

[Mike Roy]

Can you suggest the best way to add gold leaf within on oil painting? I work in oil over acrylic gesso on canvas stretched over wood. I need to appply gold to areas already covered with oil paint.

[George O'Hanlon]

The most important thing to remember is to do your gilding before you paint.

Gold leaf is best applied over the gesso and not over a film of oil paint. The dried oil surface does not create good adhesion for the gilding. You can use an acrylic gesso-compatible gilding base such as Kolner Burnishing Clay, which is available in the Natural Pigments online store. You will also need Kolner Colnasize as the size to adhere the leaves of gold to the burnishing clay.

Apply the size by laying down a small puddle in the middle of the area you wish to gild and pull it into corners and around edges. A smooth, even application of gesso will save a lot of work sanding and burnishing.

Cut pieces of gold slightly larger than the area you wish to gild. This may seem like a waste, but it's not. You will waste far more gold trying to match tiny bits together to fill in missed areas than you would if you had just used a little more in the first place.

[nazarena]

When I used to paint with Oils and used gold leaf, over the gesso, sanded VERY smooth, I'd add a layer of very thin (oils mixed with turpenoid) paint - it took sever applications to get a uniform color, so patience helped. Usually I used a terra cotta color as near to the color of bole clay as possible - either yellow or red.

Then used size - the longer drying kind since it produced a fatter final surface than the one hour drying kind. Then applied patent gold. At times I also used shell gold to make gold lines on the surface - but that was also built up from many thin layers.

I hope this is of some assistance.