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.

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.

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.

Update

We're having a computer night, no artwork going on, just digital fiddling around (we made a backup of this blog for instance...).

In previous weeks we did play around with the sugar gesso. We made it with storebought dissolved gum arabic, and it works very well! It gives a very nice domed surface with just one layer, and it sticks much better than the cold recipe, and is easier to apply than the warm recipe. So, we may end up sticking with this one for future projects!

Mistress Bridget warned us about it getting moldy, so we stored it in wet form and dried out in a mussel shell. In both forms it has kept fine, no moldiness, smellines or other funny stuff... Ok, the wet version does smell a little different after a month at room temperature in a jar, but not disgustingly so, and the pigment has settled to the bottom a little. On the jar of gum arabic there is no mention of preservatives used, but there may be some in there.

New gesso recipe

1 part dry gum arabic (powder)

4 parts distilled water

1 part unprocessed sugar;

Reading up on sugar to see what kind of sugar would be most appropriate to use we find out that all the various kinds have had some kind of treatment or added ingredient. We'll just use what we have and see where it gets us...

Dissolve, filter, apply.

We'll try a first experiment with this recipe using pre-dissolved gum arabic, which is what we happen to have.

Painting grass and trees

Laura and Bertrik came over and we worked on painting the natural background in the illumination for 1989. I went back to look for better examples to paint from, and found the Livre de la chasse (c. 1480). We had a 2001 calendar with reproductions from this book in our bookcase, still in plastic, and now we have 12 wonderful reproductions to paint from. Suddenly the puzzle of how to paint the background fell into place.

Laura painted some tests while Bertrik made lots of terra verde paint, adding more black pigment after each batch (4 in total?). This gives a color that compares well to the background in the reproductions. The very dark green in the original also makes sense, since the terra verde is very difficult to work with (sort of slimy and blobby and not very opaque), and adding the black pigment makes it easier.

I toiled on the gold, trying to repair some letters that had partially stuck before. We had added more gesso to the parts that weren't covered, and I tried to put gold on them, but wasn't very succesful. When I tested the new layer of gesso earlier it seemed to work ok, so I was baffled and annoyed. After Laura left I got to fill in the last bits of dark green, so I also got to share in the succes of the evening...

Here's a picture of the first page we've been working on the way it looked a few months ago. The illumination was started years ago, and I continued work on it in the past 6 months.

We decided to do some scribing work on the book in stead of sitting at the computer all night like last week. In the end, we spent quite a bit of time sending an email to the list for asking people to help with the book, and telling the kids to get back into bed and on the phone etc..

It's now 21.45 and Bertrik is doing some guilding. It's working unexpectedly well even though he is guilding around a piece that was allready painted years ago. Maybe it's the weather (30 plus C this afternoon and cloudy).

The gesso is the second batch of the cold recipe and has been put on a couple of months ago at least. It seems to give a more even (less bumpy) surface than the warm gesso.

I'm practicing my letters, which is also going better than expected. I might even write some lines on the book itself tonight.

To do next time: write text, do gilding on foliage pages to prepare them for group painting session at the next A&S gathering.

Baaldag

We zijn allebei gaar. Schrijven wil niet zo goed lukken, dus ga ik proberen wat verder te komen met de miniatuur van jaar 1. Bekijk de voorbeeldpagina's die ik heb gekopieerd en ontdek er van alles op. Verschillende handschriften (gotisch/bastarda), verschillende manieren om hoofdletters te maken in allerlei soorten en maten.

Ik was op zoek naar een voorbeeld voor de achtergrond van de miniatuur, dus een mooi indoor plaatje, en vind van alles.

Bertrik plakt goud op de warme gesso van vorige week, lukt redelijk. Plakt goed, maar de randjes blijven een beetje rafelig. Het gaat wel erg langzaam... Gesso opbrengen gaat een stuk sneller.

Theorie, volgende week te bevestigen: bladgoud laag 1 plakken, week wachten, polijsten dan tweede laag erop. We denken dat we eerder hebben geconcludeerd dat dat het beste werkt.

Ondanks de gaarheid toch goede vooruitgang: twee pagina's goud rond de miniatuur geplakt (de derde wacht nog), en een pagina met goudverf letters en een stuk in de miniatuur gedaan. Ook veel dingen ontdekt op de middeleeuwse voorbeelden. Leuk.

Volgende keer: blauwe, rode en witte verf maken, paar schelpjes van elk voor het geval er mensen op het event ermee willen werken. Goud op de laatste pagina met gesso doen. Verder met schrijven/miniatuur voor jaar 1.

Warm gesso recipe

Hm, some of the notes from last week were not saved, notably, the plans we made for this week. Also we're distracted by dance plans after we attended the wonderful Accademia della danza this weekend. When we finally tried to start a batch of gesso we realized we should have set the hide glue to soak for two hours, and it's too late to start that now, so we'll make some orange paint and practice writing.

Eureka! Totally accidentaly the orange batch makes a pretty nice red that might work for the dragons. Made by adding 1 part of kraplak to 4 parts of ercolano orange. 1/10th kraplak added to ercolano orange still seems a bit too red for the color used in the Rijmbijbel. All of this with gum arabic as the binder. The paints are a little transparent, so in the next batch we'll try to add a bit of marble dust to make it more opaque.

What we can remember from last weeks results is:
-the new burnisher works better for small bits, for larger surfaces the stone works just as well.
-the loose gold does not cover the gesso better than the transfer gold, but it is really annoying to work with!

Plans for next time:
-make warm gesso and use on book
-start writing text in the book
-oranje/rood verven marmerslijp erbij vanwege dekendheid

The recipe from Randy Asplund is this:
Gold is stuck onto the page by laying it on a thick ground called gesso (see fig. 6). I used a gesso recipe based on one which dates from the anonymous Naples MS XII.E.27, known as De Arte Illuminandi. It dates from the end of the 14th c., which makes it later than the style I am emulating, and from a different region, but since the gilding recipe is very simple, and there were so many different recipes, I felt that itís use was justified. This recipe contains hide glue which has been pre melted into water at a 1 part glue to 14 parts water ratio, some dry powdered Armenian Bole, some honey, and some slaked plaster of paris.
I began with a double boiler which I used to melt the hide glue. You never want to boil hide glue, and you reheat it as few times as possible, or it loses adhesiveness. I can store the melted hide glue for a very long time in an airtight jar in the refrigerator. It will keep as a gelatin. I also use the double boiler to warm some honey to the point where it will flow in an eye dropper.
I pre-mix and slab grind 4 parts of slaked plaster with one part of a soft clay called Armenian Bole and store that in another 35mm film jar. It is important to grind on a slab rather than in a mortar because a pestle will not reduce everything to a uniform fineness. Instead of slaked plaster one may use calcium sulphate (CaSO4), chalk, sea shells, egg shells, or even fine marble dust. If you use plaster (which is roasted gypsum dust) it must be slaked or it will not be inert. Slaking is when you add a lot of water to the plaster and agitate it until the plaster has stopped combining wit the water molecules. Then it canít form a structure anymore.
For this recipe I dumped a half tsp. of the pre-mixed plaster/bole into a small ceramic mortar with an equal amount of fluid, melted glue. Then I started by adding ten drops of honey, and ground the material until smooth. The honey makes the resulting gesso slightly flexible, and it allows it to become moist again when breathed upon.
The real trick is to put in just enough honey to make the gesso become slightly tacky when you apply a long, slow, moist breath, but to also be totally dry otherwise. If it doesnít dry completely, you canít burnish it later, and it will smear. The color of the gesso changes from dry to wet. The light dry color will never reveal itself if there is too much honey. It will always be dark from an overabundance of the honeyís dampness. I painted out a test and found I needed more honey, so I added two more drops, tested again, and added one more. The gesso was then painted on in two layers with a brush. It was mounded only high enough to rise above the surface texture of the page. I should have sanded or scraped it smooth after it dried, but it seemed smooth enough, so I skipped that step.

Testing :(

Bertrik is trying to put gold on the batch of gesso we made a couple of weeks ago (second batch of cold gesso). Last week it stuck, now it doesn't! Grrr. Stupid stuff, we're going back to modern glue!

No, not really. But it is frustrating!
Here's what happens: the outer edges look a bit darker to start with, and become shiny when breathed on. The gold sticks to the edges (about 0,5 mm), but not the middle. Small dots and thin lines (which don't really have a "middle") are ok.

Bertrik is also putting gold on a scroll blank that I put warm gesso on at the beginning of this month. At least this sticks... First try of polishing is so so. One dot loses some of its gold (in one spot on the side) and a leaf is ok, but becomes a little shine through.

Meanwhile I'm practicing my calligraphy and feeling the fact that it's been a long time! Every letter has to be just right, on the millimeter, or it looks wrong. Do I have the patience for this. Well, hopefully it will get easier with practice. I'm practicing gothic littera bastarda, which should provide me with a script that my persona(s) can use, and is also the script we used on the Polderslot History book, so I'm getting double value for my practice. Have to watch out for monks' cramp though, after an intensive day at the computer for my daytime job...

Testing testing

We're ready to test batch two of the gesso. We made it last week and let it dry out and harden.

To use the gesso we put it in a mussel shell with tap water and let it sit for about 20 minutes until we could dissolve it, stirring with a wooden stick.

We made several tests: one thick layer, dots, one thin layer and two thin layers.

Succes number one: this batch sticks! Whohoo!
Bertrik tried to polish the first dot, which was disappointing, because the gold disappeared... Maybe we need to wait longer between putting the gold on and polishing. After waiting a bit longer the polishing went ok but not great. Most likely, the layer of gold is too thin. Wait and see in next weeks installment of the gesso quest...

What we've been up to so far

So, we've been playing with paint and gesso for about a year now, taking very small steps... Bertrik mostly mixes stuff, and makes test pieces, and I make illuminations to use up the stuff that works.

Projects
At the moment we are working toward two goals: three small illuminated pieces on real parchment as a test of different paints and gesso's and an illuminated book of Polderslot history. This last is a project started 12 years ago (!) and never finished. We are now nearing the Shire's 20th birthday, and thought that would be a good occasion to pick it up again (you'll notice that what was an overly ambitious project to begin with has now more than doubled in size, adding 12 more years to the original 8 or 9 but we're optimistic :))...
Along the way, scroll blanks and small bits of illumination appear as practice pieces and for variation.

Paint
For the paint right now we are using all gum arabic as a binder, since that turned out to be easiest to work with. We mix up a batch and put it in a mussel shell, which is a very convenient container to store it in. It can be re-used just as storebought water colors can by adding water. We tested a little imitation vermillion red paint made with gum arabic on parchment, and it flaked off almost completely. This might be due to the fact that this was unpumiced parchment, but we are a little worried. Along with the gesso experiments, we'll need to experiment with paint binders as well...

Gesso
For the gesso (the ground to apply gold leaf to) we are testing out two recipes, both of which we've almost got working...

Recipe from The Calligrapher's Handbook by Heather Child
16 parts slaked dental grade plaster
6 parts white lead or titanium white (not period but safe, so we're using that)
2 parts sugar; in the last batch we used 4 parts, ground rock candy)
1 part fish glue
a little pigment to see the form; we used 2 parts armenian bole
distilled water (we used 7 parts, which made it quite fluid).

All this needs to be mixed and ground together very well. Then it needs to dry. After it has dried completely once, you can take a little lump, let it sit in a bit of water (just covered), stir it, and use it.

We had some problems with the first batch we made (didn't stick at all and had lumps), so in this batch we used some more sugar and we ground the ingredients much more dilligently than before. The second batch is now drying out, so next week we'll be able to test it.

The other gesso recipe we turned to when the first batch wasn't working. We found it on Randy Asplund's site: http://www.randyasplund.com/browse/tournpg/tipg.1.html
This gesso is quicker than the first recipe, and you can use it right away (no drying step in between).
The trouble we've had with this recipe is that it turns lumpy as soon as it cools down, because the base is hide glue, which is gelatin like, and sets at room temperature. Also, we're clearly too lazy when it comes to grinding, because the first batch of this also had little rocks in it. Now, we've got the gesso in a mussel shell sitting in hot water on a scented oil burner, we've ground it better, and put more water in, so we can make thinner, less blobby layers, and it seems to work better.

So, progress is very slow, but it's there! From now on, I'll try to keep notes of what we do on here, since we just realized during our last visit/advice session with Mistress Oriane that we had almost no record of what we did, which didn't help in trying to work out what we might change to improve things...