I've been busy over the weekend .....


This is where the red base has been laid down, and shaded in dark red and yellow.
The pink base has been laid down.


Now some of the shading of the pink parts has been done, and the blue and gold base have been laid down.
It's gold paint, as opposed to the beated gold leaf that forms the little pointy bits shown in the original scan of the piece. It will be shaded, the same as the other colours.

The instructions for the shading are taken from the Gottingen Model Book, written by Cennino Cennini, in the um, 15th century? I have both the original Italian and modern English versions of the workbook.
He used shell gold (arum musicum) rather than gold paint, which is the scraps from gold leafing well ground and then made up into a paint using a binder.
I have some shell gold myself - but it costs a fortune ($50 odd for a piece the size of a button - you need one heck of a lot of scrap to make a little bit of shell gold - it's way more expensive than the leaf.) I am saving it for special projects. I will paint a gold/blue acanthus one day using it to see how Cennini intended it to really be, but not today.
Then, they used it because it was paint that could be further worked upon (ie shaded), as opposed to gold leaf with it's shiny finish, because they didn't have any other gold paint available. You can press patterns into gold leaf, or tint a colour over the top if you really really wanted to, but not shade it in the way that these acanthus are. In modern times, we have gold gouache (All my paints are gouache) which I can use instead of the shell gold.

I really want to get these pictures bigger. They are about half life size. I'm saving large detailed files in Photoshop, but this seems to be the biggest picture size that Blogger will allow. It's a pity that the shading can't be seen in more detail here.