Icons remain something I love painting. Much to my excitement I received a commission some time back to do two rather unusual Icons. I needed to get some of my other commissions out of the way that had been piling up before I could start any icon work though. What remained a challenge for me was one of the Icons, a representation of St Cyril.  It had a beautiful scroll and leaf design that had been carved into wood and then a thin metal sheet was placed over the carving and pressed down into the carving to reveal the relief work underneath. I puzzled for a good while on how to create a similar effect. The easy option would have been just to create a flat gold leaf surface like my previous works, but I wanted to see if I could “imitate” the effect. Fortunately the soon to be owner of the icons was very happy for me to experiment.

I can draw, and paint, and probably do a lino cut if I tried hard, but a delicate wood carving is not exactly something I have ever tried. And then trying to source the thin metal sheet….. The logistics involved did not excite me till Phil suggested I try the texturing I had always used on my organic camel landscapes. The consistency of the texturing would not permit me to do a detailed and accurate copy of the relief carving seen in the original, but I could allude to something under the gold leaf…. Now I had a plan!

I played with two types of texturing (using all sorts of bits and bobs I found lying around in my art room) to see what sort of an effect they would create in the textured goop.  The top area was created using a heavy structure gel.  The effect is a lot smoother than the texturing underneath it, which was made with a heavy modeling paste.

I then painted the modeling paste with a red oxide paint, and when it was dry I leafed over it with gold leaf giving me the above effect.  I did the same for the heavy structure gel illustrated below.  You can see the end effect is a lot smoother.  It was also considerably easier to leaf because the leaf didn’t tear or hook nearly as easily as it did for the above prototype.  I left the decision up to the soon to be owner of the Icon and she settled on the above example using the modelling paste.  Her reasons were it had an older feel to it, and she was right.

Then came the transferring of the drawing onto the board.  To keep the scale and proportions correct for the icons I always use a grid system.

When I had finished transferring the drawing I applied the modeling paste as evenly as possibly with a palette knife.  My next step was to scratch or press shapes and lines into the paste and let it dry for 24 hours before painting and finally applying the gold leaf.

Next came St Cyril…. I started with the hands first so when I painted the robes it would look like they were draped over the hands rather than the hands pained on top of the robe.  In hind site I should have done the paper scroll first before I did the hands, but I woke up too late and didn’t want to remix the flesh colour at a later stage, because it would be difficult to match.

You can see here how the relief pattern I drew and pressed into the modeling paste was able to show through under the gold leaf giving the impression of a carving under the leaf.  I still felt the background of the painting needed to be tied together and I resolved this by painting a thin black outline between the molded leaf area and the flat leaf area.  I was very happy with the end result!