Hello friends,
I have been lurking on this thread for a few days. I'm trying to level up my gilding. So far I have only been doing small dots with miniatum ink but now I want to do more complex gilding.
I'm coming here to share my experience thus far (hopefully someone out there will learn from my mistakes!), and to seek your advice.
I bought miniatum and tried it out, essentially not knowing what I'm doing.
I did a small rectangle as well as a versal capital M. I botched the M from the first strokes and made no effort from then forth to make it look even.
I was surprised that the standard miniatum is much less sticky than the ink version, which dries really quickly and is really easy to gild.
In comparison, the regular miniatum did not feel tacky at all (20 hours of drying). I tried "activating" it by blowing on it with a straw. It made it just sticky enough for me to apply my transfer gold, but I had to do it several times over to cover small surfaces, using up a lot of gold in the process.
This never happened with miniatum ink!
I then "burnished" with a q tip, but have no idea if I am anywhere near the "mirror" effect I have heard of (probably not...).
Also, the next thing I want to guild is the M of Mathéo (below), either the whole letter, or just the outline.
Any suggestions?
Thanks for reading