Looking at the .stl file you sent, Forrest C, there are two ways I'd normally approach smoothing the shield. The first would be to trace the outline, then make an embossment from the trace that's slightly higher than the shield, and just pave over it. In this case, though, the shield isn't flat in the X-Y plane, but slopes down from the top to the bottom. It's doable, but pretty complicated.
The second way is to use the sculpting tool's Smooth function, as you've been playing with. A few things to mention about the tool. I generally use a small brush, (maybe 0.25" in this case) at a medium power setting, (say, 0.1), to outline places I don't want to smooth, like the lion. Then I make the brush bigger, (0.5 or so), and raise the power, (0.2), to flatten the bigger areas. In this case, importing the .stl model into BobArt did a little global smoothing, so there's less roughness on the Embossment than the .stl to begin with.
When using the Sculpting tools, the undo button undoes everything that you just did while the mouse button was depressed, so it's a good idea to avoid holding it down for long periods. You'll wipe out 30sec. of work to fix a 1sec mistake, which is annoying. Another thing is that the brush location gets weird when the view is anything but straight down. I tilt to have a look at what I'm doing, then snap the view back to vertical to do more sculpting.
Working with BobArt is really a lot of fun, and it's very powerful, once you get used to the toolset. You're on the right track with this one, I think. Have fun!
Luke