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...

Cutting quills

Cait came over to visit, and showed us how to cut quills. She helped us both cut one on our own, and now we're all excited to work with them!

Even though one of the lessons we learned is that we don't have the right knives, we both managed to cut a workable quill, which we didn't succeed in when we tried on our own a while ago. And using the quill is amazing, it feels much nicer on the paper, and just works better shaping letters.

The only trouble is, now I can't go back to writing with cheap and simple metal nibs... We'll just have to find some swan roosting spots and go hunting for feathers in June (something else we learned from Cait: swans drop the right kind of feathers in June, and geesefeathers you have to pluck from the bird).

So in between bouts of flue and practicing bagpipes, I used the quill we cut together to write the numbers on our wooden 'Shut the box' cards, and then I actually cut another slightly narrower quill on my own to work on a piece of music that Mariken asked me to write the words for.

As you can see below, there's still some experimenting to do (how not to start with big blobs of ink that spread all over for instance, and how to shave off bits of quill, without shaving off bits of thumb :)), but overall, I'm extremely pleased. We're set for proper medieval calligraphy, and best of all, it's so much more enjoyable to practice! So, three cheers for Cait!

We also visited the Zaanse Schans and Verfmolen de Kat to look at pigments, and had a very good (and very cold) time there. Soon we'll get around to making paint with some of the pigments we bought, and update some of the color discussions...

Slowly but surely

After a bit of a break for vacation and planning an event, we got back to work in the past few weeks. Bertrik is close to finishing the main gold work on all pages, and the first ever booklet of gold leaf as well!


Simeon came and helped last week, painting red and blue leaves. I worked some more on blackwork/green leaves.

Tonight, I was getting bored with the fiddly green stuff, so I practiced calligraphy for a bit, and did some whitework. Laura and Mariken have set a high standard on the pages they've done, and I've never been happy with the stuff I did, so I want to practice before I work on the book again.

To finish the night with a good feeling, we'll have a look at all the pages and see what we finished but didn't mark in the tabel of work. It's nice to look through and see lots of pages that are 'almost' or at least partly done. Almost no empty pages anymore :)

Here it is!

The first page that is completely finished!

This one is done with gold paint instead of the real stuff, so that will be another milestone...

Penwork and leaves

Yesterday I did the first green leaves and serious penwork, and I'm quite content with the first try. I did realize when I started drawing the black lines around the green leaves that they are shaped up side down, with the pointed bit at the end of the leave instead of the start, so that will take a bit of practice. The line of penned flowers on the left side of the right hand page turned out rather well I think.

I used the terra verde paint, and it worked better than expected, probably because these are just small shapes, and maybe also because the paint is fairly fresh (made last week).

Hopefully I will be able to finish the penwork next week, and then we'll have reached a milestone, the first page that is completely finished! Wow.

Sampler

I've been doing quite a lot of writing in the book lately, but the scriptorium last week also put me up to looking through my folder of half finished illumination projects and lots of examples of 15th and 16th century Dutch illumination.

We're getting to a stage in the book where lots of pages have been written and are ready for the next "layer": adding whitework, leaves and penwork. We decided not to spend weeks practicing before starting on the book; we've got everything from gold paint to three different kinds of gesso in there allready, and lots of people have helped, some more experienced that others, and all of that is part of the character and charm of the project. So yesterday, I started doing some penwork and green leaves on one page (see the next post), and it looks pretty good.

At the same time, I do want to try and decide on one style of letters to use, and practice a little whitework and penwork, so I'm planning on doing a sampler. These are some of the things I want to have in there:

-the final version of gothic bastarde to use
-penned capitals
-painted lombardic capitals with and without penwork
-whitework examples, both bars and a few larger letters
-line fillers

Scriptorium!

Last Sunday we planned another work session, and this time announced it a bit further ahead of time. We worked with 8 people, and got lots done, yay!

Hilde, Gerulf and Jehan worked on illuminations, Laura filled in some decorated capitals and started on an illumination, Elisabeth painted lots of leaves and her daughter worked on whitework. Bertrik provided paint, and I did a little bit of painting and lots of running around. I also looked up examples of whitework, capitals and penwork.

Bertrik took lots of pictures that he put online: http://www.bertrick.nl/photos/Calligrafie_25-03-2012/#

Sunday Afternoon

We planned a Sunday afternoon for a group session working on The Book, but due to the short notice, snow, flue rapant and various other things it's just Bertrik and me here. We're using the time to tackle some stuff that we haven't had the courage for on the regular worknights, notably working on some illuminations that have been half or almost finished for about a year: 1993 and 1992.

Bertrik estimated that we have about 1-2 years of work ahead of us before the book is done. We'll see if we make it :).

We're using the shells of paint that have been sitting in a plastic box for the past year or so, and that works fine. The terra verde paint (dark olive green, see the hills in the background of the top picture) is as unpleasant to work with as we remembered.

The top illumination is done now, and on the bottom one we just need to fill in Helena's dress, so good progress!

I also wrote the last bit of page 1990/2 and looked at the word counts. There are 339 words left for page 3 and 4, which have space for 150 words on average. Also, it looks like I've been writing a lot less words on a page than the average, so I'll have to keep paying attention and continue cutting words as I go.

Sticky gesso

The first post in the new year!

The gesso I wrote about last time sticks well; so well that little bits of the cover sheets stuck to it.

Today, Bertrik is gilding the rest of the gesso that we allready applied and trying to dissolve the leftover gesso and use it on a final capital.

I'm continuing the writing, the final page of 1988.

Do next time: write lots of read capitals. Gild page 1993 - 4 so we can finish writing 1993.

Adding gesso

After all the writing I did in the past weeks, there are now several capitals that will need to be gilded, and we found some pages with gesso missing, so we'll be adding gesso to those pages.

Bertrik is making some sugar gesso with dissolved gum arabic as a base, adding about 1 part ground kandijsuiker (sugar cristals) to 3 parts gum arabic.

Illuminations for each year:

Introduction - map
1987 - court
1988 - a flood
1989 - Group portret 10 year celebration
1990 - Maypoledance
1991 - Two knights fighting
1992 - Group portret Drei Eichen
1993 -
1994 - beugelen
1995 - dancers
1996 - double wars (trebouchet)

Saturday Afternoon

After a trying morning I setlled down at the table with the kids. They are drawing with dip pens, using diluted paint from a mussel shell, and I wrote a bunch of red capitals for page 89-4, 93-2 and 93-3.

It turns out we already marked those pages as done, so I don't get the satisfaction of marking something off the list, but no matter, we're having a peaceful moment, which is worth a lot, and also, it's a lot of fun to see them enjoying themselves with this stuff.

Next I want to try and finish the text for 1988, 1990 and 1992, all of which are mostly gilded. Page 1993 - 4 should be gilded before I write that page.

In between cooking a wonderful salad ("Sinterklaassalade"  van Keet Smakelijk) and miserable pancakes I managed to fix the text for 1988, 1990 and the introduction. Yay! Got to cross off some stuff from the list after all...

Next time we get together to work on the book we should look at the extra text I made for 1991, and some of the stuff on the discussion page to see if/where we can fit that in.

Gathering speed

We're slowly getting back into the work on the book. First we spent some time on the planning of an event for next year, and then we made some small steps to get going again.

Bertrik applied some gum arabic to some narrow strips of gesso that the gold wouldn't stick to, and that is working well. It might be a good solution to some of the other bits that we've had trouble with in the past.

I practiced letters, and worked out that I've been writing with a Mitchell nr 5 pen, and that I need to order some spares of those. They are actually wider than the Brause .75 mm, not narrower as I wrote in 2009.

We also determined that page 3 and 4 of 1993 have not been written yet, but we did rewrite the text to fit the two pages that are left (309 words). So in the next few days I can practice some more, and then I can get started on the third page of 1993, and making red capitals on the second page.

Word Count

Below is a list of the chapters of the book, followed by the number of words.

The number of words needed is 675 for a full chapter. The intro is on two pages and needs 375 words.

Intro - 339 (needs 375).
1987 - already written in the book, not counted
1988 - 561
1989 - already written in the book, not counted
1990 - 674
1991 - 484
1992 - 545
1993 - already written in the book, not counted (checken en tabel bijwerken)
1994 - 814, but not final text (parts in Dutch etc.)
1995 - 507
1996 - 602