Foliage and Gold - early 16th century french style scroll

I've been wanting to try this style with flowers, plants and bugs on a gold leaf background for a while now. It's sort of what I did for a Laurel scroll earlier this year but the scale and detail on that wasn't as high and it didn't have the shadows painted on the gold.

This is based on Lewis E.M. 11:22v at the Free Library of Philadelphia, a single leaf calendar page attributed to Jean Bourdichon. It's similar to Morgan MS M.732 and the Great Hours of Anne of Brittany (BNF Lat. 9474).

I kept the original proportions, including for the text. It is 120 mm x 125 mm. Instead of using a generic bâtarde hand I tried to emulate the original. The capital T that starts the text is also from the original. There are a lot of abbreviations since there was so little space, most using a macron to indicate missing letters. I didn't see any superscript letters for abbreviations in the original, Morgan MS M.732 or BNF Lat. 9474 but used one at the end of line 12 where I ran out of room.

The most difficult part of the illumination was painting on top of the gold leaf. The paint needed to be fairly dry and once a little bit of paint dried, I could get more to adhere to the paint that was already down. Overall, though, I was quite satisfied with it.