unfinished illuminations

So we're making good use of the lockdown working along quite happily on all the border decorations and whitework, but there are also a number of illuminations still to be done. Some are half finished, and we're not quite sure anymore who was working on which one. So all the unfinished ones are below, so hopefully people can check them out and let us know if there is one they were working on, and if they want to finish it themselves. 

Paints used

 For the borders we used:

Green - terra verde - zinc white nr 2 (Bertrik made a series of shells starting with pure terra verde and adding zinc white with little bits at a time. So this is the shell with two little bits of white added. Very scientific :)).

Blue - ultramarine

Red - permanent red

For the black outlines and squiggles I'm using a Staedtler pigment liner 0.1, after experimenting a bit with metal pens.

For the gold we're using the most simple gesso made with gum arabic with icing sugar (poedersuiker) and a little red bolus pigment.

Writing

 It took a bit of practice and finally some courage to start writing text again. Below are some pictures of how my bastarde evolved in the past 8 years or so, some practice pieces finding the right pen nib and getting closer to the style used in the book. Looking closely at the pages already written, there are differences in style there too of course, and I may tweak it a bit more as I get going again. For now, I think I got pretty close to what I was doing before, allthough it still seems as though the pen I used was slightly wider (see the first couple of lines on the new page).

Existing page of the book

Recent bastarda practice piece

Practice piece for writing in the book again

The first writing in the book again. The first 5 lines were already there, and you can see the difference if you know, but I think it is not too obvious.

Page two and other progress

 So, what did we get done this week:

- Bertrik made a great many new shells of fresh paint in different colors.

- we realised that in some years page two had some decoration between the columns, but not in others. We got together one afternoon and evening, and Bertrik gilded all the hearts, and I did the penwork. All years are done now! I'm adding some pictures showing the practice pieces, order of drawing the little flower and the result on the pages.

- worked on the texts, there is a document with the correct number of words for every year now, Bertrik is doing a final check.

- did some greenwork on pages with leaves. Comparing with the penwork I did on the middle columns for page 2, I think in the future I will draw the little green leaves with pen first, and then fill them in with paint, not the other way around...

- did some checks with different nibs. I couldn't figure out why the writing with my Mitchell nr 5 didn't look right, until I checked it by daylight, and it turns out that I was using a nr 4. Well, that cleared up that mystery...

Back

 After a long long break we have dusted off the pages of the History Book and decided to ignore the mockery of the young adults who were not even born when we started this project and have a go at it again (I won't use the word finish!). We're actually pretty pleased with how it looks and pleasantly surprised at how far we got before life and other projects took precedence.

Key info for getting back to work:

Words per year: 675

Nib to use: Mitchell nr 5 pen

Order of work: 

1. 1. gilding
2. 2. writing
3. 3. gild capitals
4. 4. paint colors
5. 5. whitework/greenwork
6. 6. penwork

Text to be found in google docs but also on wiki.

Parchment and pounce

We've been visiting and getting together with scribal friends, and have gathered lots of knew knowledge, materials and inspiration. Real life gets in the way of really doing justice to all of it, but last week we got together and worked on some of the parchment that Bridget and Aelitha gave us, with the pounce Genevieve told us about, made from cuttlefishbone. I had fun going into the petstore near work and buying two pieces of it; the package had the name in english, which made life easy.

Bertrik took a nice picture of the cuttlefishbone, and the test piece of parchment, which clearly shows the difference the pounce made. We ground up most of the first piece, so now we have these pretty wooden boxes with ready made pounce for whenever we get around to working on parchment again.

Notes about cutting quills

These are the notes I made a year ago when we cut quills with Cait. We're doing a big gathering in the fall, and we want to get the kids writing with quills. This means we want something like 30 quills, so we need to get practicing! We're hoping that this will be enough practice to feel confident of getting a reasonable result in the future.I had scanned the notes, but not saved them in the first 5 logical places where I started looking tonight, so now I'm behind the computer instead of working on feathers...