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. 

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...

Working on content

As promised we are working on finishing the content for the book. Bertrik is doing a word count to see which years still need work done on the text.

I'm looking at the years that we don't have an illumination designed for yet, and what we want to do for those years:

1988 - Polderslaughter got seriously rained out - a picture of a flood, based loosely on this lovely painting of the St Elisabeth flood of the early 15th ct.

1995 - dancing, look at dancers on the Sienna mural and adapt to look like shire members

1996 - a picture of a trebouchet and tent, based on photo's of Double Wars of that year. Also use the cart from the Macieowski Bible, since that was on the DW T-shirts we made.

Pictures of illumination in progress

Laura worked on the group picture with greenery, and made some lovely whitework. I finished year one (except for the faces, we asked in Jehan as our facepainting expert for those), and I started on the group picture at the castle several years later. In this picture I had finished the sky, using the method described a few posts earlier.

Succes

A succesful evening at the start of the Christmas holidays. Bertrik fixed lots of gold, and I did preparatory stuff for the illumination of 1992: polished and fixed the gold in and around the illumination, painted the surrounding bars blue, and practiced shading the sky.

Looking at examples in the 16th century Dutch illumination book and my brand new catalogue of the Master of Catherine of Cleves I learned that the sky should be blue at the top, fading to very light blue or white at the bottom/horizon. I happened to have a copy of Duchess Nerissa's handout on advanced illumination with the examples, and read about limning: using very small brush strokes to do shading. So I made a practice piece, and it works very well! It's possible to go back and forth endlessly fixing things. I started making diagonal strokes, which looks a bit strange. I mixed a few extra shades of blue, and next time I'll do the sky in the illumination.

Dragons

For the parchment test we chose a small design of a dragon from Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod 2315, fol 100v, a medical textbook made in Paris around 1280, reproduced in Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, second edition, Phaidon. The design with the dragon is in the middle of a page with lots of decoration and what looks like a text with a gloss and handwritten notes by different people around it.

I've been using these as practice pieces, and the first are now almost finished.

Once they are scanned, we'll put up scans of the original and my poor reproductions of it...

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...

Illuminations

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I've been meaning to document some projects on here, and now is the moment to start! So first, here are a couple of illuminated pages intended as sca scroll blanks that I started years ago. At the beginning of last year Bertrik and I started to experiment with making paints and doing illumination again, and these were the first things I picked up again.