My cousin was visiting this weekend, and we spent some time testing various engraving materials. He put his family crest on some bamboo cutting boards:
Cool stuff! The engraved and filled marble is especially nice.
Yeah I’m liking the filled look too! 
I’d love to work out a method of gilding the engraved lines, then burnishing them.
Would look stunning.
Really nice! How’d you do the fills? Enquiring minds…
Looks good right now
I’d like to say there’s a big secret to it, but I literally just painted it with acrylic paint, and I wiped off the excess before it could dry.
The surfaces were well polished before I started, so any misses wiped off fairly easily. Two coats gave them a pretty good fill.
There is the original method using gold and mercury. Very problematic to control and scrub the vapors but there is nothing that comes close to looking like the original.
I wish you hadn’t mentioned gold amalgam. It will really freak out the ‘Health & Safety’ people !
I’ve never knowingly seen fire gilded mirrors, but I know they were held in high esteem.
I learned of it from a lecture and book by an enamellist who had been researching the Medieval French Techniques and had a closed system just about the lead fumes as the enamels are very high in Lead so it could handle Mercury as well. I don’t know about mirror silvering but the gold left a kind of sputtered surface that was amazing and worked ay low enough temperatures that they could guild wood and even leaves (I don’t know about Lillies but it would be a show about control and technique and not decoration of lilies?)
Notice: attempting to use either Lead or Mercury without Professional sealed recycling systems can cause brain damage leaving folks from mad as a hatter, to dead.
