Illuminated N - N Shaded

OK, that's the shading of the N done. :-)
I need to add more at the right hand bottom side - it's not quite dark enough.

Also, the erasure of that shape on the diagonal leg is showing through the paint as ruffled/damaged paper. I did burnish well with a rubber. Maybe I should have used a burnisher. Still - it was waterproof liner pen that I used, and it was pretty sunk into the paper.

What I'll do is put the shape back (over the ruffed up paper with some paint on top - ouch. I'll pounce well beforehand!) in black with a brush.

Then I'll shadow in the edges, so it looks like a depressed (pushed in) shape.

I doubt putting in horizontal lines (as in the original design) would be a good thing. It'd be too much detail, given all the colour I've used.

I also have to

* put in some more shadow behind a couple of the curlicues that cross the N

* fix up the black background. It's got bits of gold, and bits of white/blue in various places

* fix up a little of the black shading on gold where it crosses the N, and got damaged when I was shading the N.

Then I'll be sad, coz I'll be finished. And back to script analysis, which is very worthy, but just not as much fun.

I'm already thinking of doing another piece in the same style, but using brown ochre, and putting in the black background last (to make sure it's good and velvety - I'll have to lay it in fairly heavily now to get the velvity-ness back).
Using more of the flower type shades, and fewer of those peaked leaf shapes, which are pretty boring.
Having a firmer hand on the outside "flourishy" lines and flowers.
It has occured to me that a watercolour wash on those flowers would be pretty, but I think it'd be too much for the design. It'd be good to try a very light blue/gold wash and see how it worked.
I'd also have to think whether I'd lay down all the gold, then shade in brown ochre. (as I did with the black in this piece)
Or lay in gold only where I want my middle and dark colours, adding the brown over for the dark colour. Leaving the white pristine for the highlight colour. I like using the paper as a highlight colour. The example that I was looking at with the brown ochre doesn't have a highlighting colour (which is also something to consider)

This is the example of brown oche shading on gold that I'm talking about - from Treasures from Italy's Great Libraries. (mss 1496, Venice). I included the gold shading on (erm, pink) example because I like it too (maybe not in that colour). I'll keep an eye out for other examples of the gold/ochre combination - especially for any use of a highlighting colour.

I am quite pleased (well, very pleased) with the piece. It's LOTS more 3D that it looks on the scan. Yes, I've just talked about all the things I'd do differently, but I don't think this is too bad as my first 'solid gold gouache' piece. I originally said that I'd only put up scans of parts of the piece on blogger, so Nick didn't get to see the whole piece until he saw it 'in the flesh' but I reckon that it looks sufficiently different that I can put the whole piece up here, and he'll still get a surprise.