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This piece began with a pencil outline, putting down size, and then adding 23k gold leaf on top of a sticky sizing, in this case, a type of glue.
The piece has a large number of small dots, each dot has its own piece, or pieces, of cut gold leaf carefully cut to fit and applied.
A closer photo of the goldwork in progress. The dots not yet done are darker than the paper from the size that is in them, waiting for the gold.
Each color is then made and applied to the piece. The green for this piece is chrome green.
The red for this piece is cinnabar, which is toxic so the artist must be very careful using it in powder form.
The blue for this piece is lapis lazuli, the precious stone, mainly found in Afghanistan.
The purple is manganese violet mixed with a bit of white lead and cinnabar.
Yellow ocher was added as a color and used for details. Depth was added with indigo.
The card in the bottom left is to test each color prior to its use, to be certain that the shade is correct.
The final details are then added to the piece.
White lead paint is used to make the scroll-work on the smaller letters, as well as to bring more definition and detail to various other portions of the piece.
A bit of yellow ocher is added to on top of the gold Z for a some depth and to draw the eye even more.
All of the little squiggles are done in lampblack paint with a very small brush.
All of the paints used by the artist for this piece were made by her for this particular piece, in small amounts so as not to waste any pigment. The binder used was glair, hand-processed egg whites. The ground for the 23k gold leaf is a hide glue.
All of the work on this piece was done with brushes, rather than pen-work. Many of the brushes used are extremely small and have few bristles in order to achieve the finest lines.
This piece took approximately 42 hours to complete, from sketch to finished product.
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