How to Gold Leaf & Acrylic Painting Ideas Over Gold Leaf

1. Course Preview - Gold Leaf and Acrylic Painting on Gold Leaf: I'm a fine art painter living here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I have behind me a few of my paintings that use gold leaf. Here is a pack of leaf sheets. They come in rolls or impacts like this, packed with tissue paper in between. Each one leave has lots of applications. You can use the gold leaf on objects on walls in your home on clothing, so it has home decorating and craft applications as well as for fine art painters. One thing that I love about gold leaf is that has been used throughout history all the way back to ancient Egypt. Ancient Asian screens, Eastern Christian icons, and it's been used in paintings from the Byzantine period all the way to Michelangelo. Some of you are probably familiar with the German Expressionist Gustav, Clint and even a contemporary artist. Damien Hirst has used it in this work. In this video demonstration, I am going to be using imitation gold leaf with a water based adhesive, which is like a glue. It's very easy to dio and also non toxic. I am Nancy Rainer, demonstrating seven of my favorite painting techniques that all use gold leave as a starting surface, fighting them into three categories. Transparent, translucent and okay. This'll is like putting on a layer of transparent color. That's what gives me a nice 2. Welcome from Your Instructor: Hi, I'm Nancy Rainer, with a step by step instructional video on how to apply Gold Leaf. I'm a fine art painter living here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I have behind me a few of my paintings that use gold leaf. Here's one where the gold leave is used as a background on the foreground is mostly paint. This painting uses a wide variety of techniques. You could see the gold leaf peeking through in a couple of areas, and then here we have acrylic paint and different techniques. I also glued it onto another panel, and I leave that with a copper leaf. This painting you can actually see the squares of leaf put on. You could see the gold leaf peeking through, and then this has, ah, high variety of other painting techniques, and I love using gold leaf. It's so fun to use and really has a illuminated quality to it that I enjoy. Painting with. This video will teach you all the tips and tricks to get a really good gold leaf application. So with this video today, we're going to end up with ah gold leave panel just like this, it'll be all sealed and varnished and ready to paint on. Everything I demonstrate in this video is also in a book that I wrote called Acrylic illuminations. This book has a comprehensive section on gold leaf, metallic paints, other metal leaf and other refractive and reflective techniques very unusual techniques. 3. Introduction to Gold Leaf: What is gold leaf? Well, let's look at it. Here is a pack of leaf sheets. They come in rolls or impacts like this, packed with tissue paper in between each one. And here it is. This is one sheet of gold leaf. It's gold that's hammered into a very, very, very thin sheet, and it's so thin that even the lightest breeze will send it airborne. So you want to make sure when you're working with it, that you don't have any fans on or open window right next to where you working or somebody next to you that's sneezing or breathing heavily. Gold leaf has lots of applications. You can use the gold leaf on objects on walls in your home on clothing, so it has home decorating and craft applications as well as for fine art painters. One thing that I love about gold leaf is that has been used throughout history all the way back to ancient Egypt. Ancient Asian screens, Eastern Christian icons, and it's been used in paintings from the Byzantine Period all the way to Michelangelo. Some of you are probably familiar with the German expressionist Gustav Klimt and even a contemporary artist Damien Hirst has used it in this work. Gold leaf comes in two basic forms. Riel, gold leave or imitation gold leaf, sometimes called composite gold leaf. Let's talk about the difference because it's easy to get confused between the two, so here is really gold leaf. The real gold leaf is very expensive. The price fluctuates with the price of gold, and it says 22 carat genuine gold, whereas when you get composition or imitation gold leaf often it just says gold leaf on the cover. Let's look at the difference. If we look at this gold leave here, it comes in sheets about 5.5 inches by 5.5 inches. This one sheet costs about 20 cents. Now prices do change, but often not with a composite gold leaf. This is made of real metal, so it's called metal leaf, but it's made of copper and zinc, and different companies make different proportions. This is about 80% copper and about 20% zinc. That's why they call it composite gold leaf and also imitation gold leaf because it's using copper and zinc in a combination to imitate the gold. Here's the real gold leaf. You don't find these on shelves, you have to ask, and they have to go back in. A safe or theft might be an issue. This comes in about Ah, three inches by three inches plus or minus, and when I bought this, this was $10 a sheet. It's a lot more delicate as well, so this cost $10 whereas this cost 20 cents in this video and for all of my work, I use the composite gold leaf, and I'm going to explain why I choose that. You probably think, well, that's obvious if this is 20 cents and this is $10 but that's not the only reason. Because as a fine art painter, I am going to be applying paint on top of this and doing a lot of different techniques, like sanding and pouring. When it has brushstrokes underneath and on top, and I'm using imitation gold leaf. It just feels like it's gonna be integrated more with the paint. In this video demonstration, I am going to be using imitation gold leaf with a water based adhesive, which is like a glue. It's very easy to do and also non toxic, whereas the real gold leaf. It's going to show brushstrokes underneath, and it's not going to show its full glory. Here is real Gold Leaf Marty Horowitz is an expert in water gilding, using real gold leaf. He has a shop in Santa Fe called Gold Leaf Frame Makers, and I wanted to show you how gorgeous real gold leaves looks with. And I want to emphasize this with, ah, water gilding process that is a very complex application process for gold leaf. It goes back hundreds of years without ever changing, and it gives you this super super beautiful shine. So water gilding application with real gold leaf makes sense. If you're going to do a frame and have it show its full glory without covering it with paint and doing all kinds of techniques on top, here's an example off board that has really gold leaf on one side and the imitation gold leaf on the other. Real gold leaf has a little bit more imperfections because it's so delicate, and by the way, gold leaf riel or imitation comes in different color, you can get warmer or cooler. This section costs about $30 this cost about 40 cents. Paint comes in metallic colors. You can get metallic gold paint. I wanted to show you the difference in the refraction. This is the imitation gold leaf over here, and this is a metallic gold paint. I'm gonna move it around so you could see the sheen. That's quite a difference. Leaf metal leaf comes in many different varieties and the demonstration that I'll be doing using the imitation gold leaf you can substitute other leaf varieties. Let me just show you because some of them are quite lovely. Here is a silverleaf same size as the imitation gold leaf. This is an imitation silverleaf made of aluminum. It's also very inexpensive and good for artists to use. Here's a board that has the silver leaf on top of it could see there's quite a difference between the gold leaf and the silverleaf. Here. I wanted to show you a finished painting that I made with the imitation gold leaf and another painting to the right of painting. That's very similar landscape painting that uses the silver leaf, and you can see that by using the gold or the silver. You have a warm or cool undertone for either painting. Here's a copper. It's very beautiful. It doesn't have as glossy a chyna's the gold, but it still has a nice, warm quality. Here is the copper leaf on a board, another variety of metal leaf that I like a lot is called variant gated leaf. It's the imitation gold leaf blow torched to create these interesting effects. Here is a board that I made using a combination of leaf. Here's Silverleaf on the top, and then here is the variegated on the bottom. And here's another combination. Here is a gold leaf here, and then here is two types of variegated, a blue and a red variegated leaf. There's a lot of different things you can do with just the leaving. 4. All About Your Supplies: so we're ready to start. The first thing we need to do is clear our area and get all our supplies together. So here's a list of the supplies you'll need for all the steps in applying the gold leaf, the first thing we're going to need is a surface to leave. So I'm going to use for this demonstration. I hardboard by ampersand. It's an eighth inch thick, flat panel, and I like using the hard panels much better than canvas. In fact, this is a stretched canvas, and I wanted to show you what it looks like when I gold leaves the canvas. And some of you might like this. I personally don't like having the texture of the canvas showing through like that. Ah, gold leave so thin that it takes on the quality of your surface almost identical to your surface. So this smooth hardboard is going to allow the gold leaf to shine even more. When you have a little bit of a texture, it mats the shine or mute the shine a little bit. In addition, a lot of my painting techniques are more unusual. Instead of just using a brush or a knife, I use pouring mediums, I will actually poor mediums directly on the gold Leaf panel. I will also use an electric sander, and in that case, a canvas is very flexible, and it's hard to support it underneath for standing and foreign techniques. So for my purposes, the panel works really great. You can also get panels that are pre primed. This is primed with Jess. Oh, and here is one of my personal favorites. A textured board. And here you could see the leaf on the texture, and I'm going to show you how to do that, too. Next thing we need is leaf. I will be using for this technique. Ah, company called Natron Alley. It's Italian Company makes a very lovely imitation composition. Gold leaf, a water container, paper towels. We're going to be using a water based leaf adhesive, as I had mentioned before. It's non toxic and very easy to use. There's many companies, and I've tried them all, and they're all really good. Ah, what I recommend is making sure that you read the label and follow the instructions on the label. Some of them say shake vigorously. Some say different temperatures. I happen to have a set leaf gilding size that's came in a kit. Sometimes it's nice if you're just starting off to get the whole kit, and I've poured it in a ice cream container. I love having empty containers because they have a wide mouth and it's just easier to use, So I'm not painting with this. Ice cream will also need a soft rag. Uh, I like to use cheesecloth. We'll need a mixing knife or palette. Knife will need some molding paste. I use this molding paste for the texture board. If you're not interested in texture, you don't need this. Then we'll need some kind of a mixing palette to mix up colors, and we can use these plastic plates. But I'm going to use something else. It's called a gray palette. I like using this gray palette, especially for video, because it has a great paper, and when I use the white mediums, then you can see it. You're going to need one sheet of wax paper, maybe two or three. We'll also need to use some brushes. We'll need three different brushes, a small flat, brushed with a soft bristle, Ah, larger, flat, soft bristle brush and then a very stiff, very small bristle brush. We're also going to need some colored paint. This is optional. If you're using a white primed board, you're going to want to paint it a color underneath. And this is one of my favorite colors. Red oxide. It looks like a traditional play that's applied underneath the gold lee, but here's some other fun colors that all would work really well under the gold leaf. We're also going to need a couple of products to seal the gold leaf at the end. Really, gold leaf does not tarnish but imitation gold leaf. Remember, I said it was made of copper and zinc. Copper does tarnish, and it tarnishes in two ways. It tarnishes from air. When it's exposed to air, it will turn green or dark brown. The other way is through ammonia. And, you might say, Well, who would put ammonia on the gold leaf? Ford? But there is a small amount of ammonia in the acrylic paints, and so there's certain painting techniques that really need ah, good seal at the end of the gold leaf to keep it from turning green or brown. So, uh, I like to use two different products to seal, and the 1st 1 I uses this golden's archival varnish gloss, and I'm going to explain why I use Gloss and not Matt when we get to this stage. And then on top of that, I like to seal with something else. This one is Golden G, a C 200. It's a specialty, medium, super fast drying and super extra heart, so it'll help adhesion between the paint layers on the gold leaf. And, uh, I'll talk about substitution is when we get there. In the meantime, I just want to point out I have put the G A C 200 in another ice cream. You can tell my favorite ice cream another ice cream container, so that I can dip a brush in a lot easier. And that's it. For the total supplies will need to adhere are gold leave to a surface 5. Preparing Your Surface: the first thing we're going to do is prepare our surface and going to be using. As I mentioned this hardboard surface, it has a dark color, and it's very smooth, and that is my favorite type of surface toe have underneath the gold leaf. Remember, I said, the gold leaf takes on the quality of whatever is underneath, so it's very important to take a moment and think about what you want to do underneath your gold leaf, the smoother the surfaced when the gold leaf goes on, the glossier and the shiny er against the more texture you have. The less the shine, the more Matt the gold leaf gets. Let's say that you have a surface that's white now. The problem with white underneath the gold leaf is that when you apply leaf and you could see that whatever's underneath comes through in little imperfections. Now I exaggerated the imperfections here to show you this had black paint underneath the gold. But look at how dramatic it looks. It doesn't look like a mistake here. Very small amounts of the dark brown underneath this texture are coming through the gold leaf. So again it looks intentional rather than a mistake. For some reason, in my opinion, when you have a white service and you just glued over the white surface without painting in a color first those little white imperfections that come through look like mistakes. So the first thing you might want to do if you have a white board is pain to color. So we're going to do that. Now. I like to prop up everything that I work on. Here's some empty containers that I've saved and I'm going Teoh. Place them down and then I put my board on top, and that gives me lots of room. So when I'm painting, I can actually go off the edge and ah, not affect my table, but also not affect my smooth brushstrokes. So here I have a white surface. I want to make it a color, and, uh, this red oxide is going to give you the classic ah, color underneath gold. But again, sometimes I'll use black, which remember I showed was very dramatic. Ah, bright red, bright blue. Anything you want, it's it on. Lee comes through in very small amounts. Unless you do it on purpose, you miss the gold leaf to show the color underneath. Acrylic paint comes in a lot of different forms. Basically, it comes in a thick form, usually in tubes and jars or in bottles that comes in a fluid form. You could see how fluid this is you can, for all the things that I'm demonstrating you can use. Either paint the fluid or the thick paint thing with the fluid is it's going to give us less brushstroke, whereas a thick paint would give us ah thicker breastroke. So if you like brush strokes, go over the thick paint, the first thing I'm going to do this is a dry bristle brush. I'm going to dip it in water and wet the bristles, and then I'm gonna get rid off the excess water. I don't want a water down the paint, but I do want to dampen the bristles. When you dampen bristles before you put it into acrylic, it really helps the cleanup afterwards. Otherwise, if this was dry and I dipped it into the paint, that paint would really gripped the bristles. So here I'm dipping and you can see the fluid pain is just very lovely and luscious. It's not watery but it's also not thick, so it's going to give me a little bit of a breast stroke. But, uh, not a very thick one. So all I'm going to do is paint the entire surface with this red paint, and I really like having it lifted off the surface so that I can just continue my brush strokes out. Otherwise, we tend to just go like this and make these strange borders on things. Now acrylic shrinks down in depth. All acrylic shrinks down in depth by about 30%. What does that mean? That means that what you see here, these little ridges and these this texture is going to be reduced by 30% almost 1/2 so I can try to smooth it out now that I've applied at all. But I really don't have to worry about it too much because it's going to reduce in its thickness. If I put brushstrokes underneath the gold leaf, the gold leaf has a painterly quality to it, and that helps integrate subsequent paint layers on top. So now that I'm finished painting, I like to take my brush, and I like to get rid of the paint on paper towels. This is ecologically better than taking pain and just keep loading it into your water bucket. When paint dries and it's on a paper towel and it's put into a landfill, it doesn't affect our environment much at all. But putting paint into our water system does so what I'll do is I'll get rid of the pain here. And then I put my brush in here, and I'm going to leave the brush in the water until I'm ready to wash it correctly, which means washing it with soap and water. If you take your brush with paint in it and leave it, it's going to dry and ruin your brush because acrylic dries pretty fast and pretty hard. For now, I'm gonna leave the brush in here, and I'm going to show you a second alternative to a surface underneath the gold leaf. Remember earlier, I showed you a board of gold leaf over a texture, and I use this a lot. I love texture, so I'm going to show you how to get the texture using a molding paste that will put underneath the gold leaf. So I'm gonna use another hardboard I'm using golden's molding paste, and I'm going to put some on the palate. Okay, I think that's about enough to cover this board. It looks pretty gloppy, and it looks like a lot. But remember, I'm trying to make a texture, and you can't make a texture with a thin layer of anything. So this is my molding paste. Now I can add a color to it. I can add the red. Um, I can add the black. I think I'll just add the red. Stay consistent, and I wanna mix it up. If I don't add color to the molding paste, then I'm working with a white paste. Remember when I said that white underneath the gold leave tends to look like mistakes and that still looks pretty light. So I'm gonna mix in some of this red that I have from the last painted surfaced. This still looks pretty light to me. Adding color to a white molding paste means you really lightning the color as you add it. So I'm gonna add a little bit more that looks much better. And now I'm going to apply it onto this board, and I'm gonna play kind of thickly if I take it and I'm scraping, then I'm not getting any buildup. So I like to take my palette knife and I think about as if there was a little ball, a little BB underneath, and then I can smooth it out and still get some thickness. Now I like to vary things, so I am not going to apply it over the whole board. I'm going to just apply it in places there. Now that has some kind of a texture underneath, and it may not look like much, but when the gold leaf goes on top of it, it's really gonna be emphasized. This is the same board in a drive for my made it. Before that, I made the video so you could see it when it's dry and it drives kind of Matt and it dries a little bit darker. And so here is a board that's ready to leave in a few hours. This will be ready to leave, but if you lived in a wet climate, it might take all day. Now we have three options for gold leafing in her next step, we have the original hard board that is unpainted. We have the Jess owed board that was white, that we painted red. And then on another board, we applied the paste with the color to create some kind of texture, and now we're ready to leave all three boards. 6. Applying Adhesive: this is step to applying the adhesive. Now there are two basic categories of adhesive. There's an oil based adhesive and a water based adhesive, so the oil based adhesive has solvents and is toxic. So I am choosing the water based adhesive, and one important point I want to make is that when it says on the bottle that it's a water based adhesive for leaf application or they also call it gilding, then it's made specifically for this process, and that means that when you apply it, it has a long tack time. That means that it's going to stay tacky or sticky for the gold leaf for up to 24 hours. That is a special purpose acrylic. So I recommend Onley using a product that is very specific to adhering gold leaf. So this is my water based adhesive, and I've put it in this ice cream container so that I have more room to dip my brush. So the first thing I'm gonna do is get a smooth, flat, soft brush, and the object is going to be applied this adhesive onto the board, but applying it in a very thin layer. We don't need to glop it up, You know, if you remember, but I'm going to dip this dry bristle into the water so that I have damp bristles to work with. And then I need to get rid of the excess water or I'll be diluting the adhesive and you don't want to dilute the adhesive. I've got damp bristles, and now I can dip it into this adhesive, and I'm just going to start in one corner and I got a little too much on this brush, so I'm gonna wipe it off. What I want to do is just get this corner nice and thin without jumping all over the place . That way, I can really get a nice thin area in this one section. So you see how thin that gets. And let's this one application is really getting a large distance. So see how far you can pull that adhesive before you dip back in. Could how much area I got just from that one brush amount? Now you can see that on this hardboard. It's soaking in really, really fast when I work on the hardboard. In general, I need to do two coats when I use remember we made this other alternative board was a Jess owed board and we painted it red. So now when I apply the adhesive on this, I'm gonna dip my brush in a little less. This time I'm going to start in one corner and I'm going to really stretch that corner out again instead of jumping all over. I'm just going to see and this is really sticking in a whole different way. I'm just gonna move from one area to the next. And this is so fast drawing to the next stage the tacky stage that you can see. If I drag my brush over this, it would really pull and create some weird texture that I might not want. So once I get it in an area, I leave that alone and move on to the next area again, very thin. And don't keep going back to old places because it'll get all tacky. So this one is sitting on top in a different way than on this hardboard. And so Ah, one coat is plenty for this board. Then our third option was this textured board. And here it is dry. Make sure that your molding paste is dry. I like to touch acrylic, and if it feels cool, it's still in a curing phase. It's still drying. So again I'm gonna dip the brush in the adhesive, going to start in a corner. And if you notice that I like to go in different directions instead of just applying it like this, I call it washing windows. I like to work again, a small section in different directions, and that's really helpful for the texture, where it's where it's puddling up. I'm trying to smooth it out, and if there's a place that you missed, then the gold leaf will not stick. The gold leaf will Onley stick toe Whatever has adhesive on it. This water based adhesive, it is very difficult to get out of your brush. Remember, I dampened the brush first and got rid of the water so it's gonna help. But boy does it stay on that brush. So I recommend washing it really good with warmer hot water and lots of soap. But it takes a lot to get it off. Now we have to wait. This is an important step. If you apply the gold leaf right away and it's still watering wet, then it's not gonna work. It has to reach a certain stage, So it's called the tacky stage. Tacky would be a word for the back of the Scotch tape. If it feels like the back of Scotch tape, this should be a subtle tacking. Almost like your Scotch tape is a little old and losing its tack. It's the knuckle test. You take your knuckle and you put your knuckle on it and it stays on the board and it feels like the back of Scotch tape. Then it's ready to be leaved. Read the label of your particular brand of water based adhesive that you chose that he's have also comes in a spray, and this might be good for very high relief texture with a brush. Applying the adhesive on a high relief texture would be more difficult, and you'd get puddling up so the spray adhesive would be good for that 7. Leafing & Burnishing: So now we're ready to apply the gold leaf. And before I take out that package of gold leaf, remember, the leaf was so thin it would float in the air. I want to make sure that I don't have any adhesive in puddles on my table or still stuck on my hands. It makes it very difficult to apply. So the first thing I'm gonna do is wash my hands. So from water, get rid of the adhesive. You might think that I'm a clean freak, but actually, you'll see if you have any adhesive around in this next step. It really makes it difficult. So I'm gonna take the paper towel and I'm gonna wipe away any puddles. Here's a little spot and also I'm going to take the board that was propped up on those jars and I don't need it cropped up anymore. In fact, I like it flat on the table, so I'm bringing it back down to the level of the table and now I'm ready to leave. So here I have my panel. It has theater east of the adhesive is ready. It's nice and tacky. Here is one pack of my imitation gold leaf. And it has the tissue, which really helps keep each leaf separate. By the way, some brands of imitation gold leave have a sticky side on the back of the leaf, and I found that that actually was not easier to use. And the glue that was stuck onto that leaf had a pattern that I didn't like. So here's my leaf, and I have no windows open and no fan on. So it's staying put. Take a piece of wax paper and I lower it down onto the gold leaf. And then I use my soft part of my hand to rub between the leaf and the wax paper, and it uses static and it holds the leave onto wax paper. You can pick it up and you can try to put it down, but it's really going to be hard to place it and get it nice and smooth. Now I can just really easily bring it over to my board, and also I can see through it before I lower it too close to the board. I'm hovering about 45 inches above, and I'm going to try to get that corner, but I'm gonna try toe, overlap the corner. I don't want to try to get the corner. Exactly. I want to overlap it. So here I drop it down. Do you see how I overlapped it? It goes about 1/4 an inch or half a niche outside of the edge. Then I just take my hand, my wife that down and pick up the wax paper and it's stuck on there, and it does have the excess flapping over. And that's great. You want excess and I'm gonna show you how to get rid of that. It looks messy now, but it'll look great when we're finished. So then I go back to my a pack of leaf. I'm going to show you a couple of common mistakes that happened. But mistakes are all part of the process. I'm using this as a background for painting, so I like the mistakes. Happy accidents. That's what artists like, right? OK, so by the way, there's no right side or wrong side to the gold leaf. I could start from the back of the pack or the front. So here I have my second square on the wax paper and I'm hovering over the board about 34 inches above, and I want to overlap again. It's really hard. Don't tryto be exact, and it's actually better to give a little overlap. So here I do. I'm dropping it down, rub a little bit, okay? When this happens, it means that this needed a second coat. So there's not enough adhesive. Remember I was sending this is a very absorbent board, and right over here, it didn't get enough. And he's it, so I will show you how to fix it. What I want to show you is that you don't have to be so perfect. There's ways to fix this really easily. In the meantime, I'm gonna do the rest looking. Now I can take some of this excess and I just pull it off like this. And with my hands, I can put it in the areas that didn't get the leaf. I am going to go to the next step and burnish this and then what I need to do is put adhesive back in those areas and relief it. Take your soft rag or a piece of cheesecloth and you want to press really hard wherever the leaf iss and I need to press everywhere, so I'm doing it in a specific pattern. I'm doing each leaf separately. Okay, this one's finished. At this point, I'm going to leave the other two boards and then I'll come back to this, put some adhesive on and show how easy it is to fix glitches like this. So let's take this next board, which has the red paint on it, and this is much more tacky because this is less absorbent. Now let's say I really want that read to come through. So instead of being need about the squares, I could be kind of messy and just sort of put it on like this and put it on in different ways so that more of the red is gonna show through. This one was done that way. It had a black underneath, and you could see how I put the squares down in a random way. I want to show you a couple of common problems that happened with the leaf. So here's the 1st 1 Is fear of the leaf and going down really, really slow and ups. Oh, no, no, no. How do I get it off? So the best thing to Dio is Teoh. Brave it and you want to keep it level and just drop it down. And then there it ISS. If you find that you're lifting your wax paper and the gold leaf isn't statically clinging to the wax paper, it could be two things. One is that you're not really rubbing every area of the leaf because as you rub it is where the static makes it cling or your wax paper is getting so old. So change your sheet of wax paper. Here's another square again. We're doing a random pattern here. And then instead of using a new square again, I can take off the excess and with my hands, maybe I like this ripped edge. Try the ripped edge over here. Also, some of the gold leaf is stuck onto the wax paper and I can use that for areas. When you've finished applying the leaf, then you need to to the next step, which is burnish. One thing you don't want to do is furnish without the wax paper. If you do that, you're gonna scratch up your leaf. It's very delicate. The stage If I'm going all over the place. I won't know that I've actually burnished every single square inch. So I like to think of things divided into squares. Do the bottom square here and I moved the wax paper up. Okay? And we'll leave this one to dry. And now we have our textured surface and I'm going to apply. Leave exact same way that I applied. The other two have belief. Take the wax paper, drop it down, rub it gently. When a hover over the corner, drop it down, Rob again Gently lift the wax paper up there. It issue could see this adhesive is really holding a lot better in one coat, then on that absorbent surface that I did first. Now this one, I'm gonna I'm not going to do random. I'm just going to try to get it all covered. See, I don't worry if it crinkles up in places, it just gives it more character. One more piece to get that last edge. So there it is. And if you see any little areas that are missing, it's easy to just take the excess from the edge or to take it from your wax paper. And you could save this for your next project. Start in one square, Really burnishing. I'm really putting a lot of pressure in this. Now everything is leaved. Except this one. Lets say I don't want the's big areas showing, and I really do want the leaf on there. Then all they have to do is go back and get my brush. Make sure all the water is gone. Get my water based glue adhesive. Dip it in and I don't have to worry about overlapping. I'll just glue right over. I can even glue over this whole square. There, there. Then I let it dry the proper time to get the right tackiness. And then I can take the squares of leaf and put them right on top. 8. Cleaning Excess Leaf: so if we look at our leaf ford, it looks pretty messy. But it's really easy to get that excess off now. The gold leaf is only going to stick to where it is put on top of that adhesive. I always do this step outside because, well, it's fun to watch the gold leaf fly in the wind. It's really hard to get this out of your studio or out of your home when all these little pieces air flying around it also gets on your hair and clothes. But it is about 12 degrees outside, and the cameramen and I do not feel like going outside, so you could also do it over a large trash can. The trick is to use a very small, very bristly brush, very stiff bristle. And if I took a brush and just went like this all over, I'd get scratches all over. Remember I said that the gold leaf is still pretty delicate, so I'm getting is very small brush, and I'm first going to do the edges. I'm gonna get it off the edges. All right, so now I got the edges, and now I'm going to get the inside uh, where the two squares met and notice. I'm gonna use the smallest part of this brush and just flick to get it off with doing the least amount of bristle damage on the leaf. So some areas, you just have to work more. But this area here has all of this stuff. There's no way I'm gonna be ableto lightly pick. So here, I'm just gonna go for it and it'll get a little scratched. But I like little textures. So here I'm being a little brutal, and I wouldn't do that in other areas. Here again, I can go in really delicately and just flick the pieces off. Then at some point, I can take this cheesecloth and very lightly. I'm not even rubbing it. I'm just gliding the cheesecloth over to get rid of the little extras and then on the side . Look at how pretty. Now that we've seen the whole process, I want to go back and say that there's a couple of fun alternative ways of applying the adhesive. So on this board, you could see that the gold has taken on an interesting design. And the way that I did that is I used a small brush to apply the adhesive. I dip it into the adhesive, and I'm painting with just the adhesive on the board. The design that I want. Then I let it dry for the correct tacky phase. And then I take the leave sheets, just like I did before. Each square wanted a time overlapping, so the whole thing was covered with gold leaf. But when I cleaned off the excess instead of picking out each design, I just took a whole brush and brutally wiped off the excess. And I ended up with this. And another way of getting some fun effects with the gold leaf is to apply the adhesive with a turkey baster. So same thing squirted out with a turkey baster. Let it dry to the appropriate tacky phase. It was thick, so it took a little longer. And then I put gold leaf on. All the sections of the whole thing was covered, took off the access, and there we go, and one more. This was done just with drips. I just took a palette knife, dipped it in the adhesive and just dripped it over the board and applied the same process to it. So just want to show you some more innovative ways of using the gold leaf 9. Sealing the Leaf: we have completely finished the gold leaf application process. But there's one more step that I wanted to make sure that I talk about in this video and that is sealing the gold leaf. So we have to leave boards. We have our smooth board, and then we have our textured board, but it is exposed to air. And remember, I mentioned that imitation gold leaf is made of copper and zinc, which means that it will tarnish. Copper will tarnish two ways with exposure to air and also with exposure to ammonia. When it's exposed to air, it takes about a year, sometimes to tarnish. When it's exposed to ammonia, it can tarnish right away. Now, I mentioned before, there's a small amount of ammonia in acrylic products, paint mediums, gels, pastes, whatever you're going to use on top, and I use all of them on top. The thin applications of paint or mediums gels, pastes will dry fast on the ammonia won't tarnish it, but when you start using thick applications of paint, it will tarnish it right away. If you want really successful results for something else to consider other than ceiling, and that is the time that you wait between stages, you got to be careful and make sure that you let the board dry at least three days between applying the adhesive and applying the sealer at least more is better. That's because that adhesive is still kind of delicate and trying to cure. And if you rush sealing it while the adhesive is still a little bit uncured, you might get some problems. So now I'm ready to seal. I'm gonna pretend that I've waited three days for this to dry, and I like to put on at least two coats of a sealer first. I like to use a solvent based acrylic right on top. A solvent based acrylic means that it's gonna go really easily on this metal surface. One is this M s a mineral spirit Acrylic varnish with UV protection. So this is a really good varnish, and this comes in a can. You have to dilute it with solvents. And that's pretty smelly and pretty toxic. So you need mask. You need ventilation, you need gloves. You would pour into a container, add the solvent, mix it up brush, apply the alternative to that still toxic is using the same thing. This is the same thing in a spray form. Spray makes it really easy, but still you need to wear a mask. Need wear gloves. Then I recommend calling a company that works with a lab safety supply. You call and ask and talk to their technical department, and you tell them what solvent you're using and they will give you the proper mask and filter. You can't just use any old mask. You really need the proper filter. So Gannon really emphasizing good safety practices in this first seal coat, using a toxic solvent based acrylic. Either brush, apply or spray. Now, instead of using those two golden products, you can call gilding supply companies. They do furnish their own products for sealing than the next. Best thing is to use a clear, glossy acrylic medium that is fast drying an extra heart. And Golden does have a product G a C 200 for using metal here, and so this adds extra adhesion to your layers of paint that they're going to go on top of it. I actually used this over a coat of the solvent based toxic spray or brush apply. But if you're not going to use the toxic stuff, then use at least two coats of the G A C 200. And if you can't get a hold of the G A C 200 then just try a polymer gloss medium and use a two or three coats of that. So I'm going to apply this the G A C 200. I've poured it into another ice cream container. I am going to use another flat, smooth brush, my favorite brushes, and I want to mention that I'm using a different brush than the brush that I used for the adhesive. And that's because I didn't clean it yet. If you use the adhesive brush and it's not clean for this step, it's really gonna screw up the whole layer. And just like before, I'm going to dip it into the water. So again I'm gonna blot it on the paper towels to get rid of the water. Now, here's the trick. When you're applying the G A C 200 on a board that doesn't have the solvent based layer below, any water on your brush or in the medium is gonna beat up on here, so you want to make sure that you have absolutely no water like before. I'm gonna prop it up to that. I have full access to my arm movement and again, just like we applied the adhesive. I'm going to start in a small section because this small section is gonna be totally dry by the time I finish applying it on the board. And I really want to smooth it out. So now I'm gonna do a section next to it, and it's got some lumps and stuff. So instead of applying it all over, I'm just gonna work in small sections. So now I've got this whole top covered and it's almost dry. In fact, this is dry already. Any ceiling coat that we put on top at this point is going to cut the gloss a little bit, but it's still very reflective and very beautiful and still a far cry from using gold metallic paint. If I had a bristle brush like the kind that I used to get the excess gold leaf off, it would leave huge tracts and would be a smooth is using this nice, flat, smooth brush. So now we've just completed one coating of a seal, and it's already dry. But that's because it's here in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It drives a super fast. If you're in a cold, wet environment, then you might need to wait maybe an hour or two for it to be totally dry. You could also blow dry it to quicken the drying process. Once it's all dry, I highly recommend putting on a second coat. And if you are just using the G A C 200 then the more the better. 34 coats would be perfect. In fact, some of the techniques I use like sanding. They will sand down some of these layers, and I like having three or four coats to give extra protection to the Gold Lear. One more tip anything that you put on top of the leaf. Make sure that its glossy and not matte or satin just want to make sure that you realize that acrylic is naturally glossy. And for any non glossy acrylic like matte or satin, a white powder called matting agent is added. If you use any products that are matter starts and it's really going to cut the gloss. Ah lot, it's going to take the gold leaf and the whole process that you did and make it look just like metallic paint. So thank you so much for joining me. I hope this helps your creative projects and gives you success and gold leafing. 10. Intro to Acrylic Painting on Gold Leaf: I'm Nancy Rainer, demonstrating seven of my favorite painting techniques that are used on gold Leaf. I have several of my paintings behind me that all use gold leaf as a starting surfaced and several painting techniques on top. We could call those over painting techniques, So if we look at this painting behind me, you can see that it started with a gold leaf surface. And then there's several painting techniques that are used on top. Let's take a look at this smaller one. This one actually has all of the painting techniques I'll be demonstrating in this video. Here we can see the gold leave coming through, and that's a very transparent area. I use a glazing technique for that. Here you can see there's an area where I used paste. It's a great way to create a very opaque area. Get some interesting contrast. In the texture of the surface appears a more unusual technique that uses glass bead gel and creates an interesting contrast to the high gloss, high refractive metallic gold leaf. All of the techniques that I demonstrate in this video start with a gold leaf panel. This gold leave panel cannot be obtained in an art store. At least I don't know if that, but it's really fun and very simple to make it on your own. Before I start with the first technique, let's gather together all the painting supplies we're going to need for the whole video. So first we're gonna start with a gold leaved surface, and I want to mention that this is made with imitation or composite gold leave, using a water based adhesive on a piece of hardboard. And as I say in the other video, there's many other surfaces other than the hardboard. There's many other choices of metal eat that you can use, but for this demonstration purpose, I'm gonna be using this. All of the painting techniques can be used on a variety of metal leaf and a variety of services, such as canvas panel would wall objects and fabric. So first thing get your surface that you want to work with. The second thing will need is paint, and I call this paint color because it has color and paint color comes in many different forms. This video uses mostly acrylic products, so I am going to be using acrylic paint. You can use oil paint on the gold leaf. But for the purposes of the specialty techniques I'll be doing, Let's use acrylic paint because will also be using acrylic products in conjunction with the paint. When I say paint, I mean colored paint and they the acrylic paint comes in two basic forms. It comes in a thick form and let me just squirt some out so you can see here is PIRA read. It comes in a tube or a jar, and this is called a heavy body paint, and it's very, very thick. And if I take a palette knife and run it through, you could see how thick. If you like texture, you're gonna want to use the thick paint. And all of the techniques that I am demonstrating can use any type of acrylic paint. Here is the same color. Pile red in a bottle and look at the difference. It's the same color. It's the consistency that's different now. We have a very fluid type of paint, so this will give you texture, and this will reduce the texture. But it still has a little bit of texture left, so any paint that you want to use and pretty much any color. The thick paint, the heavy body paint or the fluid will work for most of the techniques. The next thing we'll need is some paper towels, roll of paper towels. We'll also need a water container, some kind of a large size. I like really big. Large containers like this will also need some palette, knives or mixing knives. And then we'll need some type of surface where we can use the mixing knives and the paint to make some mixtures. Now these air great visa plastic plates, they're disposable. You can actually use them and save them. Put them aside, and when they're dry, you can use them again instead of wasting them. And I also like using, and I'll be using this for the video. This is a great pad, and it's made of a special paper that makes it really easy to mix colors on, and then you can peel it off. When you're ready toe, move on to a new clean surface. The last thing will need our brushes, and I'm just going to say, Just grab a few of your favorite brushes. The short handle ones air good. If you're sitting. The long handle ones are perfect for when you're standing up, there's a flat ones and round ones. And then there's us. Very soft. Smooth ones will need one of those for glazing, and this is a little bit stiffer, so a nice variety in size and tight would be great. 11. Key Concepts Painting on Leaf: any painting technique can be used on top of metal or gold leaf. The key is if we took paint and we painted an image of the whole gold leaf and covered all of the surface. Basically, you wouldn't see the gold leaf anymore. So what I wanted to do? Waas talk about taking painting techniques and dividing them into three categories. Transparent, translucent and opaque because we want to know which techniques were using so that at the very end, the painting still has the glow of the gold coming through. So what does that mean? Transparent, translucent and opaque? Well, let's look a transparent. Any color that we use over the gold leaf that still shows the gold leaf through is going to be transparent. It reminds me of wearing a pair off colored sunglasses. This is like putting on a layer of transparent color over your gold leaf. I can see very clearly through, but everything's turned pink, so translucent is a little different. You could still see through it, but it's a little bit cloudy or foggy, so I could take my sunglasses and I could breathe on them and put them on, and now, instead of clear and pink. It's a little foggy or veiled and pink that's translucent. Another way of looking at translucent would be if we took a piece of wax paper and cut it and looked through it. We would be seeing through, but very foggy and blurry that's translucent again. The gold leaf will still show through the translucent as well as the transparent but slightly different effects. Opaque is generally if you take paint and use it straight without diluting it with water or without diluting it with mediums, it's going to pretty much have a heavy coverage. Here's a painting that I haven't process. I started it. It's not quite finished, but I wanted to use it to show you how I work with techniques and build them up to create a finished painting. Now here we see a large area of the gold. That's a lot of gold for me to still be showing in a finished work so this we'll get covered with other techniques. But let's start at the top with the sky. This is pretty much finished this area, and if we look at the blue, colors vary opaque. You cannot see any of the gold coming through, and gradually, as it comes down, it becomes more and more translucent, like a foggy view of the gold leaf showing through and then here with the red. It's very transparent, almost just like the sunglasses that I wore. This we have transparent, translucent and opaque all three in the same painting. In all of my paintings, I use a combination of techniques to create the finished painting. I want to emphasize this because in this video I'll be demonstrating seven different separate techniques. For instance, one of the techniques I'll be demonstrating is a faux tarnish here. I've created the faux tarnish over the whole surface. I think it looks pretty cool, but to me it's not a finished painting. It's not enough for me. It would make a great background, and I could start to put other images on it. I could also use it in a small area of a larger painting for a textural interest 12. Subtle Colored Glazes: technique. One subtle glazing in addition to the general painting supplies I talked about earlier. We're going to need to add two things for this technique. The first is will need to add some kind of a slow drying medium. I like to use this acrylic glazing liquid. Now all the mediums that I'm using are going to be glossed, not matter. Satin. Anything that's matte or satin has a fine white powder to it, and that is going to cloud the gold leaf. So if unless we want that effect, let's stick with all gloss medium products. Now, if you don't have access to ah, slow drying medium, and this one happens to be a slow drying medium, you can also make your own by using a combination off a gloss medium. Just a regular krilic lost medium. This one's called polymer medium gloss, and you can add some retard. Er, I'll be very careful. You want to add on Lee up to 15% retard er to the polymer medium gloss. If you had too much retard er than your mixture may never dry, be very careful, but that will make you a really nice, slow drying medium You can also use a gloss gel that will also be a slower drying medium to use. We'd also like to use a very, very soft, flat, wide brush, anything that you could envision applying to your face like a blush brush that's gonna be soft enough for a glazing technique. Nothing to bristly and harsh. So the first thing we need to do is to mix up a glaze. What is a glaze? Glaze is a transparent mixture of color that when you apply it, you can see through it just like the pink sunglasses that I wore. And I'll be using this Eliza Rin Crimson Hue and you can make a glaze with any color that you want. But I'm going to start by demonstrating a red or pink glaze to use this color. I use it a lot on my gold leaf. It kind of warms up the gold in some areas. I'm gonna squeeze some out on the palate here if I use this straight. This is a very intense color, and I will probably cover up most of the gold leave using this color. So how do I make it more transparent while paint is made of basically two components pigment, which gives it the color and binder, which is clear. So if I ADM or off the binder, I'll be adding mawr of the clear stuff. I'll be making the paint into a different mixture that's more transparent, so binders come in different forms. As I said, we can get a gel, we can get a medium, but I want to use a slow drying medium to give me lots of time to spread out the glaze. So it's not all streaky and putting it in places where I want. I'm going to use this acrylic glazing liquid, so I'm going to start by squeezing some of this medium out. Andi, those of you that know acrylic mediums tend to be white when they're wet, and when they're dry, they dry totally clear. I'm gonna add a little bit of color into this now. Why didn't I just add the medium right into the color? Because it will never get there. For some reason, I don't know why. It's the mystery of painting. If I add glazing medium to the pain itself, it just stays pretty intensely colored. It's just like cooking. Sometimes the different process. Different procedures creates a different and result. I know some of you like very specific ratios, but really, the ratio is up to you. It depends on how transparent, how subtle, How intense. You want the glaze, how you're going to apply it. Sacred, thin lots and lots of variations. Lots and lots of variables. So let's just start with a 50 50 mix were 1 to 1 will start with an equal amount of glazing medium to paint. So this is not a scientists ratio. This is an artist ratio. There's a lot of given take here. Does that look 50 50 to you? Well, it looks pretty good to me, So I'm gonna mix it up now with a knife. Why am I not mixing it up with a brush? Well, a brush is meant to hold color, and a knife is meant to release color. So if I mixed it all with the brush, I'd have it all on the brush on mixed. Whereas I want to create the mixture first and then did my brush into it. So I'm creating with the knife. As you can see, I've got a nice little pile over here. Now let's test it out on the board. IHS. It's too subtle. In other words, if there's not enough color, I can't see it. I can go back and change the mixture by adding more color. If it's too intense and too strong a color, I could come back and add more medium. That's why I like having the two components on the mixture all separate gives me more control over making that glaze mixture just the way I want it. Now we're ready to apply the glaze. First thing I'm going to do is take my gold leaf panel and prop it up on some empty jars. Now it has a lift from the surface of the table. If it's flat on the table, then as I come to the edge, I won't be able to use my glaze in a smooth arm gesture. I'll end up stopping, and it creates a weird effect. So if I want total freedom in my application of the glaze, I need a lift Now. Sometimes you can get those panels that are cradled and they have sides on them. I really like using those. You don't have to use the jars they just come with their own lift. This technique is a subtle glaze. Why would I ever want to use a subtle glaze? Here is a little test board that I made here. You can see the red glaze that I'm about to apply. This is very subtle when I have the gold I just wanted. Let's go back and look at this gold. It's very beautiful, but it just looks like gold foil. If I start to add some transparent color in places, it really breaks up that home and not me of gold, and it starts to bring out the qualities of the gold. When I look at Golden, I flip it back and forth. It has a slight green red tend to it. It looks some green and some lights. It looks red and other lights. And so what I did with this board is this is gold leaf, but it already starts to look. Atmospheric. Already starts to look like it could be a painting emerging. It's got the little bit of red little bit green. It's shifting that gold. I'm going to start by using a rag, and I just want to get little patches of red. And if I have the green glaze, I would add that, too. But let's just start looking at the red, so I'm gonna dip it into the glaze. So here's a rag. I just like to use old T shirts or old sweatshirts after they've been washed a lot. Then they tend to be let free. And let's just apply it on this gold and see how it looks. That's pretty subtle. Now, with a rag, I can get a nice feathered edge, and I could start to apply it in different places, and I can also using the clean area of the rag. I can really get it subtle, but this whole gold shifts now just high. Having a couple of little red areas notice. I did not put the glaze over the whole entire gold leaf panel. I just want to show a little bit of contrast between the actual gold leaf and then the leaf that has that glaze on top. Let me show you an example of where subtle glazing might be in addition to a painting here I have a painting, and some might call it finished. It has the gold leaf left unglazed on the top and the painted area on the bottom. Now this gold is very uniform gold, so it has kind of a graphic effect. So in a way, I like it like this. If I used subtle glazing, ran and green or other colors, maybe some blue from the water. If I did some blue subtle glazing on the top, then there would be more integration between this gold band at the top and the painted area on the bottom. So here's a good example of where glazing would really help. Let's take a look at a larger size panel that I have ready to go for me to paint. It has the gold leaf on it. It has patches of red and green. I call them patches because I'm using the rag and I'm applying this startle glaze in very small areas all over the panel. But I am leaving some areas of the gold blank unglazed, and I have some red and some green glaze is just breaks it all up. It has an interesting quality to it already. Let's do one more thing with the subtle glaze. Do you see this red stripe here? What I have is a red stripe that's much more intense than this extremely subtle rag applied area here. So what I want to do is I want to apply this glaze a little more intensely than I did with the rag. And instead of ending with a hard edge, I want it to gradually disappears. How do I do that? Well, here's a trick. I made a mixture here of one part color toe, one part medium, and because I used the rag and applied it so thinly, that was perfect for an extremely subtle glaze. So what I want to do is add a little more color to it. So now I have my glaze mixture that's more intense than what we just used. It's about a 70% color to about 30% acrylic glazing liquid or slow drying medium. I'm getting a little more intense because I added more color and I'm going to brush. Apply at this time. Give me more control and I'm gonna show you how I make it slowly disappear before I dip this dry, bristle brush into the acrylic. I always like to dampen it because it's much easier to clean at the end of your painting session when you dip damp brushes into the acrylic. I don't want to add any water into this glaze that will completely change its ability to cover the way I wanted it to cover. So I'm going to take my brush, dip it into the water. I like to get rid of all of the water. This is now just very slightly damp without any dripping water. Before I dip this into the glaze, I'm going to dip it into the medium, the plane medium. And I'm going to decide where I want that red stripe to disappear. So right about here is where I want that red to start to disappear, so to take the plane medium. This is also why I recommend on your palate, always having the components on the mixture separate. You can always use either one of the components or the mixture. Now I have all this glazing liquid on my brush. But get that off on the paper towel and now I'm gonna dip it again. If there's no water or medium in this, but it's slightly damp, I dip it into the glaze and I'm gonna run it across, and as I run it across, I'm going to slowly make it disappear into this glazing liquid, and now it's still pretty streaky. So I'm gonna take what's on the brush now and get rid of that. So now I can smooth it out with a brush that doesn't have water on it, doesn't have extra medium, doesn't have extra glaze, and I can start to take away some of the color. So notice I'm brushing some of the color and then I'm getting rid of it on the paper towel , rushing some of the color, get rid of the paper towel, and now I could keep smoothing it out. Yeah, this is more intense than example. I was showing, but I'm liking it. I can still get rid of more color, and I'm just gonna go back and forth and get it nice and smooth. Do you see how having that slow drying medium right here allows me to end this red area in a gradual, disappearing act? When I'm applying glaze, I continually wipe off the excess on paper towels. Really good. It's a really good idea toe. Have dry paper towel near you to do this technique, and you can see that it started out pretty intense. And as I work it, it's just getting less and less intense. That's because I'm getting rid of some excess paint, just going back and forth. And it's a really good thing that I have this propped up, because if you noticed my brush strokes air going out of a few inches on either side. So all of my brush strokes are moving on and off of the surface and giving a wide frame on either side. That's what gives me a nice, smooth breastroke. It's starting to set up. It's starting to dry, even though it's a slow drying medium. When you get very thin, it will start to dry and look at that. It's like a airbrush look, and it's slowly disappearing. This is a nice way toe, have some transparency and then have it slowly disappear instead of real obvious hard edge lines. There's something else I want to show that's really fun. When you apply an area like this using the slow drying medium and it's a glaze and it's a all over evenly applied area like that, you can take a paper towel or a rag and you can start toe wipe away separate shapes if you do want a hard edge. I just showed you how to make a soft edge. But if you wanted to make a hard edge, you could start to apply a glaze over a large area and then wipe away the ones that you don't want to create some interesting shapes. 13. Intense Colored Glazes: technique to intense glazes. Now, if we look at the panel on your left, that is the subtle glazing that we just finished demonstrating. You could see the red glaze that I demonstrated, and the green one has done the same way on the other side. But look at the panel next to it. It's the exact same technique on Lee. I'm using more paint and less medium in the glaze mixture. Here's an example of where I'm using intense glazing and you can see that the blue is very intense. So here I'm using the intense glaze toe actually make a color statement rather than something subtle. Here's another painting with great example off some intense glazes. The bottom red is very intense, but you could still see through it, whereas if you look at the top blue stripe, that color is so intense that it's almost opaque. What I'd like to demonstrate instead of repeating what I did for technique one. Just using more color in the glaze mixture, I'd like to show how intense glazing can really look interesting when you're using a textured gold leaf surface. So here is my textured gold leaves surface. The video that I made on Gold Leaf Application shows how to do this. Basically, I mixed molding paste with some color and applied that first to my surface before I adhered the gold leaf. So what you have is a nice, interesting texture Underneath the gold leaf and the intense glazes is a really nice way to emphasize this beautiful texture. So let's go back to the glaze mixture that we have from the last technique and Justus you would imagine. I'm going to be adding more color to make it more intense in fact kind going to go back to my bottle of color at some more on the palate so I can really get an intense color. The trick is, you gotta use the slow drawing medium and mix it with the color. Especially for this, even though it's intense, you might think you could use the straight color without any medium. But because acrylic is normally fast drying, it would make it difficult to do the technique that I'm going to show you. I'm now about 90% color and about 10% medium, so there's my mixture, and now I'm going to dip my damp brush again this was dampened before into the glaze mixture, and I'm just gonna apply it. You could see how intense that color is, but apply it all over the board and of being pretty sloppy about it, because what I'm gonna do next, his wipe it off. Now I'm going to take a rag, fold it up and wipe it off. And as I wipe it off, the glaze is getting caught where the texture goes down into valleys. So it's like the textures creating hills and valleys. The color is going to stay in these hills and valleys. Now it's starting to dry on me. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the rag and get a clean area and dip it into this medium here, and that helps me clear it even more so I'll just do one area for now. Can you see how that collar is glop ing up in these crevices in these valleys? And it's really emphasizing the beautiful texture. So let's do the whole thing. But add need a little more krilic lazy liquid. Try wiping it off first without any glazing liquid on your bag. And if the paint is drawing starting to dry then and you need a little extra help. Then add some glazing liquid. If I added water, the whole thing would come off. And the key is that you want to take some of it off, but leave some of it on. And now you can see that it really changes the whole quality of this gold leave textured board. He can really start to see the texture under there a lot more. 14. Translucent Layering: technique. Three Translucent layering. There are several products that will give us a translucent layer or a translucent effect. In this demonstration, I'll be using three products. Matt Medium Match L and Glass Bead Gel. It's up to you which ones you want to use, but add those to the list of general painting supplies that we talked about earlier. Now acrylic is naturally glossy, so when you see Matt or satin acrylic products, that could be a medium, a gelora varnished. What's added to the glossy acrylic is a matting agent. It's toxic because the powder is ground so fine. So once it's in the product, it's not toxic anymore. Remember earlier, I said Onley use gloss products over the gold leaf. So let me make this clear. If you don't want to cloud the leaf, then stick with gloss products where you using acrylic in its natural state. But here we're gonna be talking about techniques where we want to cloud the surface, and I'll show you some examples off where we might use it to our benefit. I'm gonna start with Matt Medium. I'm gonna use a brush, and again I'm going to dip it into the water and then get rid of the water because I'm not interested in diluting them at medium. But I am interested in easy cleanup, so working with the damp brush helps me to dip it into the mat medium. And then I'm just gonna paint a nice little wavy line going across, and I don't want it thick and textural. So I'm gonna wipe off the excess on the paper towel and then just go back over it and kind of smooth it out a little bit. Now what I have is an area when it's dry, that's going to be slightly cloudy and slightly Matt. This is a great way to break up the monotony of all that gloss. Here's an example of it when it's dry, a very thin application of the mat medium and you could see how it really changes that gold leaf. Now let's try a thicker application of the mat. Instead of applying a few coats of Matt Medium, I'm going to switch to a gel now a gel. This is extra heavy gel mat. So again it's your clear, glossy acrylic polymer that has this matting agent added to it to create a matte product. But unlike the medium, a jealous, very thick. So instead of applying with a brush, I'm going to use a knife. Apply with a knife. You could see how thick it is. I'm going to apply a lot of the gel, and just as above, I'm going to create kind of a swerve the line. I'm using the knife. I'm not scraping the knife against the gold that removes the gel. Instead, I'm thinking of a little ball, a little BB underneath the knife so that I can glide along and create a depth to it. Create a thickness. It's about an eighth of an inch thick. Now this is going to dry. Ah, lot clearer, but not totally clear. It's going to dry translucent into a cloudy area. Let's see what it looks like when it's dry. This is gonna take probably a day to dry, and it will take more time to dry if you're in a cold or wet climate. So here was the mat medium of thin layer of the medium, and here is a thicker layer of the gel. One note of caution that I think is very important when you start using acrylic very thickly, like we just did eighth of an inch or thicker. Then you need to make sure that your gold leaf has been properly sealed before applying the paint. Here is an example off the extra heavy gel mat applied on the gold leaf very thickly, probably about 1/4 of an inch thick, and you can see that as it dried. It was so slow drawing that it had time for the ammonia in the acrylic product to react with the copper in the imitation gold leaf to create this tarnish. If I used real gold, it wouldn't tarnish if I had sealed with three or four layers of a glossy medium again, I talk about sealing in my other video. Then this would not happen. You may ask, How long is that thick layer of extra heavy jail Matt going to take to dry? That's a good question out here in Santa Fe. It's about an eighth of an inch thick, I would say about 6 to 8 hours, so if you live in a wet or cold environment, it may take a day or two, but you can always keep painting on top of it. acrylic never needs to dry fully before you add the next layer of acrylic. Here's a simple landscape painting. This is not gold leaf, but I wanted you to see the full effect off what a mat product can do as an over layer over paint. Here is the exact same painting. Yes, I made two at the same time, but on this one I added about an eighth of an inch thick layer of the extra heavy gel mat. Can you see the difference in the two paintings? This one looks like it's pushed back in space, so it's more cloudy and it's Matt. It's not a shiny, but it also creates a special effect. And just to prove my point, I painted Ah, third painting. This one has the mat gel like this painting. So it's this under painting with this match L. And here it is again. I painted the trees on top of the match else. We've got three layers. The under minor, the mat layer and then I painted the trees again. And can you see how? Let's just compare these two. Can you see how different the mad gel affects our under painting here? are some advantages of using translucent effects. First of all, it kind of looks like wax, so if you like wax effects, you can add it to your painting to create a wax effect. It can also push back space. It can create a deeper sense of a background. It can also help break up a large expanse of glossy gold leaf by just adding it in. A few areas really break up that monotony. Also, if your colors are very bright, you can use the mat and the translucent effects to mute those colors. I find translucent effects really great for skies and clouds technique number. 15. Cool Technique Using Glass Bead Gel: technique number four. Another way to create a translucent layer using glass bgl. Unlike the mat, medium and match L we used in the last technique. This one also creates ah clouded, veiled, muted effect. But in addition, it has a sparkling quality to it that I really like. Here's glass bead gel. You could make your own by taking any clear, glossy gel or glossy medium and adding little particles of sparkly things to it. It already comes as the product, so I'll be using that in this demonstration. When I open it, it looks quite white. This product is really two basic components acrylic gel and glass beads, and it looks like it's pretty white and opaque. And that's because most of the polymer or Krilic products start off white when they're wet and then dry, clear and glossy. So the white medium in here is going to dry up to clear and glossy, exposing these clear, glossy glass beads. But right now it looks pretty white, so I am going to apply it, uh, some thinly and thickly in different areas, just to get a variation in how it looks when it's dry. When I get it real sin. Okay? Kind of scrapes and scratches. Okay. Like most layers I do. I won't do it on the whole thing. I'll just do it on parts so that I really have contrast between what was there before and what I'm now applying. Then what's fun about the jealous that you can actually use some textural tools here? I have a palette knife, but there are some other fund textural tools, even credit cards or fun. And I can actually scratch through and create something interesting texture. This is going to take, um, about a few hours to dry, so I already have prepared one. I applied the glass bgl exactly like I did in the demonstration, but it's been a few hours, and it's dry. You could see the difference. Look at the difference between when the product is wet and when it's dry. So again the medium has cleared up, exposing these little glass beads, and so it has a translucent quality. And yet it also has a sparkly quality to what I like to do with this is apply paint in a wash. Just the shift, the colors a bit. I have two colors here. I have blue and I have white. You can use any color you want, and the trick is toe add lots of water. So here's some blue. I'm using the fellow blue, and I'm using a fluid. You can use the thick paint or the fluid as long as you're gonna add water to it to apply a wash of color over the dried glass. Bgl. I want to make some colors into a wash. Basically, I'm adding water in a large percentage to the paint so that it gets so liquidy it slows not just on top of the glass bgl, but sinks in to. So again, adding more water to the pain is going to allow the pain to really sink in and show off these glass beads. And now I'm going to add about half and half, half water, half color. You could see that the water is mixing in with the color, and this is what I call a wash. Ah washes nearly paint diluted with water and cleaning off the knife so that now I can mix up this white paint color with water, and now I'm ready to apply the paint color onto this glass. bgl. So I'm gonna use a brush and I'm gonna dip it into the paint and let's see how it looks on this glass bead. Joe, it's not really sinking in the way I'd like it to. So what I could do is go back in to this bucket of water and I could add water first on the glass bgl, then go back into the paint color and now you could see the difference here. I'm applying the wash over a dry surface and here I'm applying and over a wet surface of Prewett surface. Now I'm gonna have some fun. I'm just gonna apply water in different areas and I'm gonna apply the white and I'll play the blue, and I'm just kind of randomly applying it. Look what happens when the wash goes over. Just the leaf without the glass. Be Joe. It starts to create a very interesting puddled up pattern. I'm kind of liking that. So I'm just gonna keep going. And sometimes I like to just take it right from the plate and just pour it over. And if it's too much, I can just pour it back. If I have too much color were too much washed. I can also take some paper towels and dab it dry. And there you go. It's still wet, and when it dries, it's gonna look a little different. Here's an example in a finished painting that I made of where I used glass be Joe. So here is a detail. You could see the glass bgl on the right, and here is the painting in full, and you could see how I'm using it in small sections, non over large areas. 16. Opaque Paint Color: technique number five Acrylic paint color. There's a wide variety of paints available. There's paint in the thick, heavy body that comes in tubes. There's the fluid paint, lots of colors, and don't forget the metallic paints to There's copper gold, silver. So any of those pains when we apply them on the gold leaf without adding water to create a wash or without adding medium to make it into a glaze, it's going to have really good coverage and cover that leaf completely. Let's look at an example over here, other than the top gold leaf sky, all the bottom and the birds are painted with opaque color. Basically, I'm just using color straight out of the tube, mixed together with other colors, maybe a little water, maybe a little medium, but not enough to make them transparent or translucent. Basically, using straight, undiluted paint is going to give you an opaque layer. Paint comes in metallic colors to so here is an iridescent gold course, and there are bronze copper, several different varieties of gold paint. They don't have the luster and the refractive quality that gold leave does, but they do have quite a punch to them. and I like using them in addition to the gold leaf. So I'm gonna put some pain out on the palate. Here's a permanent green light. The thick paint is going to give us a texture, whereas a fluid paint is going to give us lex less brushstroke unless texture. Here's a fluid pain. Anything goes fluid, thick, pain, metallic. I can use the paint straight, or I can make some colors together by using white. I can create tents. I can apply them on my gold leaf using a knife or a brush. Here's the iridescent gold. Here's some white While they're still wet, Aiken, blend them together, and basically all your regular traditional painting techniques will work on top of gold leaf. But don't forget when the Ropeik, if you use them too much and cover all of your board. You have no more gold leaf left. In addition to applying with a knife or a brushed, I like to use a rag or paper towel as a tool, and I like to come in and take pain away. It's just as interesting and application technique, using a paper towel or a rag as a night for a brush. Here's another painting that I made, and you could see that it has a variety of transparent, translucent and opaque areas. The red stripe of the top is very opaque, and you could see some of the areas the blue, the green and the white are also opaque. Here's another painting that I finished that has much less color. We could call it a minimal color palette compared to the other one. 17. Sanding Techniques on Leaf: technique. Number six Sanding Sanding is one of my favorite techniques, and I'm gonna show a couple examples at the end. Let's say, in the previous technique, which was acrylic paint color, you went really crazy with paint and covered the entire board like this. Okay, you could barely see the gold leaf showing through, but this is a perfect opportunity to try out the technique sanding. Now this is still wet, so I'm going to show you a different board. Here's a dried example off aboard that was covered with paint and I started to sand right here in the middle, and you could see how on taking away the color but still leaving some remnants. So let me show you how I did that. What will need for this technique is a spray bottle with water, and we'll also need some waterproof sandpaper. Usually they're black on one side, and this one says waterproof paper, and I like the to 20 grit, but any great will do so I'm going to continue this section by spraying it with water, and I'm going to rip a piece of the sandpaper folded to give me a good grip and then I'm going to start sanding right here where there was a lot of opaque color. And as I sand, I'm going to take some paper towel and I'm going to continually wipe it off to see what I've got. Now you could see this is a great way of getting a variety of opaque, translucent and transparent areas. So what looked like, ah, lot of heavy coverage paint is now starting to give me with the sanding some really interesting varieties of coverage. Let me go attack This area of red Theo Key is to make sure there's always water between your sandpaper and paint. Now this gold leaf board had some texture underneath, which makes the sanding even better because it starts to pick up that texture under there. Can you see how it's starting to really change the quality? And here is a finished example where I sanded the entire surface off again. It started off with all of this opaque paint color, and now you could see it's got little fragments of color. This would make a great background and would also add some really interesting detail in texture when used in a selected area. Here is an example of one of my finished paintings that uses the sanding technique and almost the entire painting. You can really see it very clearly in the upper left, where there's red and black mountains, red and black paint was applied, and then it was sanded, and you can also see it very clearly in the green, near the bottom middle, where the green was applied solidly and then it was sanded back. And here is another example of a finished painting of mine. You could see the sanding technique in the top mountains in the bottom half. There's an interesting texture that's created because I used instead of gold leaf, I used something called a variegated leave here. The sanding on the top relates very well to the texture that's created by the variegated leaves on the bottom. 18. Special Effects with Pastes: technique Number seven pastes pace. Give us another opportunity to create some interesting opaque layers. There's a wide variety of acrylic pace to choose from. I'm going to use one of my favorite. It's called light molding paste. One thing that I really like about it is that when it's dry, it's very absorbent. I am going to apply it in one area, thinly and in another area thickly, just so we can see the difference in the coverage that it has. So here I'm applying it kind of thinly now. Acrylic shrinks down in volume by about 1/3. So if I applied it really thinly like like this, it's gonna shrink down and not be visible very much so. I'm gonna give it about an eighth of an inch thick, and that's thin. That's what I consider thin and then below it. I'm going to make it about 1/4 inch thick again. It's gonna shrink down by about 1/3 so it won't look as thick. By the way, I really liked propping up these panels so that I have free reign to go off on the side. One thing is fun about the paste. Is that it makes beautiful texture, so I can actually run my palette knife or other textural tool through there. I can start to work it like this, and I can actually scraped through other layers to make even more of a variety of thickness . Now the pastes don't take as long to dry as a gel, so I would say in a couple of hours it should be dry. But to speed things along, I have an example. So we could see. Here's a thin area, and here's a thick area. And remember, I said that it reduces in volume, so these were applied a lot thicker than the When you see it now, remember I said, that light moment pace that a beautiful absorbent quality. I'm going to now take advantage of that by mixing water into paint color and creating washes, just like we did with the glass bgl but applying it over this absorbing paste. So I'm gonna use a plate from the start with just one color for now. And this is, ah, fluid paint called quinacrine own magenta. When I work with washes, I like starting with the fluid. It's just easier. It's already in fluid form, and I can add a lot less water than if I was starting with a thicker paint. So now there's the color, and I'm gonna add a little bit off water, actually, a lot of water. If we want a ratio, I would say it's probably about half and half. Half paint, color toe, half water. If I was using a thicker paint like the heavy body, paint would probably have to add a lot more water. Now the first thing I can do is I can wet some areas of this and keep other areas dry. So here's my dried light molding paste on the bottom here over the gold leaf. I'm going toe wet some areas and keep some dry just so you could see the difference when I apply the wash over dry and wet areas. So here's my wash. As I apply the paint with a brush in a wash over this absorbent light molding paste. It's taking on really interesting quality. It's going in and out of the texture, and I have the ability to change that even more and get even more variety by patting with a paper towel and or adding more water in places. Now this is going to change when it's dry. So I want to show you some dried examples off washes, just like I demonstrated on just plain light molding paste on the whole board. So there's no gold leaf on here. Here's one example. Look at how the bleed effect creates this soft edges and a really gorgeous effect. Here's another example. I really want to show you the beautiful effects that you can get by using washes. In other words, diluted pain color over and absorb int surfaced, so gold leaf is not an absorbent surface. Gold leaf is very non absorbent. It's very shiny and glossy. By using the paste in some areas, we could create a really interesting contrast, using the washes over the paste. As I mentioned before, there's a wide variety of pastes. Another favorite paste of mine is called course molding paste, and I want to show you how different it is when it's applied over the gold leaf and using washes. So here it is. It's still a white paste that's very opaque. It's still in absorbing surface, but it has a real tooth equality to it, and I'm going to use it instead of with color. I'm going to use it with a metallic paint. This is one of my favorite special effects. I'm going to start by using the fluid iridescent bronze Fine. This is a metallic paint in a fluid form, and I'm going to make a wash out of it, so I need to add some water when you mix it up. Now this bronze pain is very special. It's actually not made with real bronze metal. It's made with Micah and paint color to simulate the bronze. So what happens is when I add lots of water and I use it on a wet surface. So I'm gonna This is the court's molding paste applied, just like I apply the light molding paste. Now, on adding water on top. I'm gonna add water all over as you could see the water beads up on the gold leaf anyway. But it's really sticking to the absorbent paste, and now I'm going to take my brush and dip it into this bronze wash Again. It's the bronze paint with water and then apply it all over the board. I don't have to just pick selected areas because it's actually beating off the non absorbent gold leaf, but it's sticking to the absorb int paced. Now this looks like I just covered it with brown. But if I let it sit and then let it dry, it turns into this and you could see that it actually creates a faux tarnish or a foe patina. It's very exciting effect when it's dry, it's separated out into color and the mica, so it still has a reflective quality. Yet it has this interesting color looks just like, ah, faux patina or a foe tarnish on. This would make a really interesting selected area in your painting for texture or a whole background. 19. Finishing Varnish Topcoat: now that we're finished. I wanted to also add that it's very important toe varnish, or put a finishing seal over your whole painting that adds UV protection that won't yellow or crack. And that will protect whatever gold leaf you have under there, especially if you've used imitation gold leaf from tarnishing. And one of my favorite varnishes is this one. Because it's non toxic. It has an orange X on it because it's an eye irritant, so you should wear eye protection. It's water soluble, and this is a great way to finish off your whole painting. Thank you so much for joining me today, describing my seven favorite over painting techniques on Gold Leaf. I want to remind you that all of the over painting techniques, as well as how to apply gold leaf, are in my book. Acrylic illuminations