I tried some black shading on this top flower, and the black shaded in much better. The fixative worked - I can work with the black without re-wetting the gold and mixing it in.I've also removed most of the gold from this main flower on the left.
I really like the affect.

It's been bothering me. You need 3 shades to made an object 3D - highlight, base and shade. Gold is the base, black is the shade but I didn't have a highlight. I did try using some shell gold on the flower yesterday but it wasn't visible enough.

I'm going to add back some gold to the flower but leave some of the white paper visible to form the highlights. Then fix it, then shade with black for the dark bits. Effectively doing the highlights in reverse, instead of adding them on top of the base colour, which should be interesting.

I left the inner circle of the flower because that worked fine.

I hope that I can do the same, lifting gold to show the white paper to form the highlights, on the right hand side, given that I've already sprayed it with fixative. It's only a bit of plastic stuff - it should come up with a brush and water with my nose to the paper.

I'm very pleased because now I'm sure of the way ahead whereas I was a bit unsure before. "The magic" has happened for me. I can envision the work much better. I'm also very very pleased with how much work I've been able to do. 4 hours a day for the last 3 days. It's because I'm feeling healthier than I've felt since about August last year as well as having a fun project to work on. :-)