Here is my attempt at repainting a pair of Borghese owl bookends to resemble the owl bookends seen on the I Love Lucy show. The picture above shows a Borghese bookend on the left and on the right a bookend like the one in Ricardo’s living room on the show which I will refer to as a source to replicate the paintwork and then attempt to apply a marble effect on the base.

The Borghese bookend appears to be a resin copy of the original design on the right which is a cold painted metal/bronze owl on a marble base.

I used three colors to paint the owl. First I painted the eyes in  Yellow Ochre and then two coats of Raw Umber for the rest of the bird with extra touches to darken the forehead area and top of the head and back as needed to match the owl on the right.

For the book it took two layers of green and then a watered down layer of raw umber on top of that to tone down the color of the green and to darken the gold pages.

I used Windsor & Newton Galleria  acrylic paints, Yellow Ochre, Raw Umber and Phthalo Green for the Owl. The color was a good match straight from the tube so no color mixing was needed. The final touch was black for the pupils. I had no  black paint so I mixed some raw umber with ultramarine to create a vintage looking black.

Here we see the source bookend in the center with the Borghese pair on either side. Up to this point the work has been straightforward but the unsightly green speckled base needs a faux marble paint over which is something I have never done before.  I found a video on Youtube which gave me an idea of how to proceed. In retrospect I would have done a test piece first but I just went ahead knowing I could wipe it off at any point or just paint extra layers on top.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsTGjGVzcE

I experimented with a mix of Cadmium red , Burnt Umber and Yellow Ochre tinted with white for the base following the Youtube video for guidance.  I painted in layers adding streaks of darker and lighter color damping down with a paper towel to soften the effect and  using a clean wet brush to feather it  in places instead of splashing on water as was seen on the video.  The composite picture above shows the Borghese bookends at various stages. Next step is to apply a few layers of matt acrylic varnish to protect the paintwork.

Finally here is a side by side view of the repainted Borghese bookend on the left and the original source bookend on the right.