Today I tried gilding the Ra piece. First I painted the engraved parts black with some acrylic paint, and squeegied off the excess. Then I brushed on the size (a.k.a. glue) trying to avoid the engraved parts.  Then applied leaf.  A fair amount stuck to the engraved areas since glue inevitably got in there.  I cleaned them up a bit using a knife and a finishing nail (fits just right) and reapplied the leaf to many areas.  I then cleaned up the engraved areas again resulting in what you see below.  I used a black Sharpie to touch up some gold spots in the black. I have another pass to do before I think it’ll be spiffy looking – or at least look quite a bit like what I saw at the Egypt exhibit at the De Young Museum sometime back.

This took several hours of tedious work, so my only other achievement was cutting a few pieces of glass down to size for some frames with my newly purchased class cutter.