Really well, it was one of the first things I did - I was artsy as a child and made images and mask-like sculptures of all kinds of things, spirits I’d seen in my head, gods from history books, all kinds.
At some point I started doing an “opening of the mouth” ritual, based on the ritual of the same name done during Egyptian funerary rites - I had to make it up, it used to go something like “Now I open thy mouth, that thou might speak true; now I open thine eyes, so thou might see me; now I open thine ears, that thou might hear my prayers.”
I’d seen the images of the Egyptian priests holding a tool to the mummy’s mouth, and used to use whatever was special to me at the time to point whilst reciting the words, I was forever making wands and things like that.
I had no context for this, thought I was the only person in the world doing it and because I was a kid (and quite a childish one) the line between playing and actual practice used to blur sometimes, and I didn’t have any real routine, I’d get interested in something else for a few weeks then come back to this.
At one point they stopped just feeling inhabited, and I started receiving telepathic communication, and slowly, sketchily, that started to be (for example) information about future events that happened, or other stuff that’s as close to objectively “real” as you can get.
I had virtually no friends as a child, certainly no little gang that shared healthy activities, and this kind of stuff I did was first the result of that, and then later on became the cause - I just had nothing in common with them! lol!!
Friend: “Hi, want to see my new Barbie?”
Teenage Eva: “Sure - want to see my new image of Hathor, and watch as her eyes change and come alive when I call her name?”
Meh.
I'm quite certain that statues and imagery in temples influenced how a spirit was perceived or how it manifested, not to mention that it might end up holding some of that energy over time.
To this day many Hindus believe that you can be seen by their gods directly from making eye contact with a murti, they call it darshan, the seeing of the god’s soul in the image, and the being-seen in that same way.
I’ve done this with various beings and it’s almost frightening when you realise there is SOMETHING looking out at you through the picture you painted (or printed out) or the sculpture you made.
If you intend to do this, paint the eyes last, working inwards towards the pupil - that’s when the soul’s seated and contact can begin. I can’t remember where I read it but some Hindu statues are sold without the eyes completed so the final seller or perhaps the person who buys it can complete the opening of the image via painting in the pupils, the “windows of the soul.”
Some fanatical Xians who believe all images are evil refuse to have any photographs, and I read one site years ago where this guy was raving about “wandering demons” who possessed a poster in their child’s bedroom, and made dolls and teddybears start actually moving around like they were alive.
The gist of their poorly-punctuated site was that ALL inages are graven images just begging to be inhabited by malicious entities, and it would be easy to laugh, but sometimes in the past, posters I’d have on my walls would take on the exact same aspect of being a living thing looking at you, that I’d intentionally instill for short duration in the images I made.
I think there’s something to that theory, and I avoid having images of and deity or demon or any other spiritual being that I’m not actively working with, and I somewhat limit random images of people for that reason, though I’m not fanatical about it - I have this picture of a model with really good makeup pinned by my dressing table, and she sometimes gets a bit what I call “peepy” i.e., like something’s using her image to look out from, but it doesn’t bother me.
The image and starting-base of my Personal Daemon is photo of the man I structured him on, and that definitely comes to a kind of life as I call my PD through it - the eyes flicker slightly and the photo kind of becomes higher in contrast.
Funny you mention scents... yesterday was the first time I actually smelled something during interaction. A pine-like scent, there was more to it but I'm underdeveloped as far as naming substances go ;)
Cool! I was hoping it wasn’t just me. 
I remember reading somewhere, I think maybe in either The Exorcist or The Amityville Horror, the claim that visitations by “the devil” leave a smell exactly like human faeces, I find that stretches credibility a bit, and I’ve never noticed demons smell unpleasant.
Maybe just when they’re trying to frighten people? Or maybe whatever was visiting them was one of the truly hostile and inimical entities and not the kinds of beings we like to work with.