Bringing New life into an old gourd

Years ago I made this Great Blue Heron gourd.  I was so proud of it.  I spent a lot of time with the pyrography for the portrait and the scene on the opposite side.  It is also one of my earliest gourds that I carved a scene on. 

​Sadly, even though this gourd garnered many looks and oohs and aahs, it never found a home.  

**Note: You can watch the accompanying video now on YouTube here: ​https://youtu.be/8BQ7x-Cnou4 

As the each show season came and went; the rest of my art progressed while this gourd stood still frozen in time.  The more my other art improved with new experimentations the less appealing this poor gourd started to appear.  There was not anything wrong with it.  It just wasn't up to par with the rest of my work.  I was beginning to feel embarrassed for even displaying it anymore.  That is when I decided to do something bold.
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I pulled the gourd and decided to give it an overhaul.  I took it into the shed and sanded the finish off.  Then I repainted the inside and put weights in the bottom.  I put weights in all my gourds now but this was made before then.

I scoured my old photo files to find my original reference photo.  Then I pulled out my woodburner and re-pyrographied the herons on both sides.  It had faded and also lost color when I sanded the finish off.  so I set to darken all the pyrography back in.

Next, I went in with colored pencils, and then with transparent acrylic paints.  

When this was done, I set to work on the carved panels.  When I first carved these, I wasn't using much color overall, so I had opted for a yellow ochre tinge to the entire panel. Now I thought it needed to stand out more, so I wanted to paint in the rainbow trout.  I wanted the trout to really look metallic and reflective, so I first added a layer of silver leaf before I started painting.

Below are the before and after photos of this gourd.

So what do you think of the transformation?  This gourd almost went into the trash, but as you can see it was worth giving it some love!  If you would like to see more and watch over my shoulder while I worked on this you can view the companion video here: https://youtu.be/8BQ7x-Cnou4