This fall I started a new series of paintings, based on my experience with various gilding leafs and their properties. I titled the series "Sliabh Órnite", which is Irish for Gilt Mountain. My first in the series is a view of Lake Louise at sunset, in Banff, using various japanese leafs imported from Japan, aluminum leaf, and 23kt gold leaf. Metal leaf is a very very thin square of real metal, so thin that it's like cobwebs, thinner even than tissue paper. You apply it to your sirface using a special glue that dries very tacky, and everywhere glue has been painted, the leaf sticks.
To leaf in different colors, you have to approach it like Ukranian egg painting or batik... apply the glue for a particular color, lay that color of leaf, then apply the glue for the next color, and so on. Some leaf types react to varnishes, changing their color and tones, which can be used to create a special effect when used with non varnishes areas of the same leaf.
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To plan where I would be gilding and in what colors, I first made a computer version using Photoshop. For that I scanned in samples of all the leafs I wanted to use, as a sort of palette, and then digitally gilded the mountains so I could decide where I wanted what. Boiling down all the millions of colors of a mountain range into 7 or 8 colors was really challenging (!), but eventually I got it where I wanted it.
To begin the actual painting part, I hand stretched a 30"x60" canvas on double wide stretcher bars, gessoed it, and then applied a base of black acrylic paint.
After tracing down my design using the computer mock up version as a guideline, I began leafing the sky and sunlit mountains.
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