Back to reality

Tonight 3 of us continued work, and hit some snags. First of all we very usefully spent some time discussing the garters we are weaving for November Nights, so we started kind of late.

For some reason the gesso completely refused to take the gold, so the gold work got suspended, hoping it's just the weather, which has been weird the last couple of weeks anyway.

We admired Turmstadt's book, which is beautiful, and a much better example of realistic planning... It's very impressive, and it was actually done in time. It also contains a very nice map of the Shire and its surroundings which we'll take as an example for the map that is planned for our book.

Yvonne did some work on the illumination for year 3 (1989) and I wrote 1/3 page of text for 1989, and we put the pictures in the previous posting, so the night was not completely wasted...

I'm starting to think that the writing might not be a terrible bottleneck, since all the jobs are pretty time consuming. Maybe everything will balance out in work hours. 3 evenings for an illumination, 3 evenings for doing gold on one page, 3 evenings for writing one page?

Shire workshop

We had the gathering on Sunday and flew through the work! 6 people were seated at the table doing red and blue borders and leaves, whitework and lots of gesso. It's really motivating to see some of the pages that are (almost) completely done now. We're sitting here imagining what it will be like to leaf through the book when it's all done...

Klusjes voor de workshop:

• tekst bijwerken/maken
• illuminaties verven
• rechterpagina's naast illuminatie extra regels onderaan toevoegen zodat ze gelijk eindigen met de linkerpagina.
• blokjes blauw/rood verven rond letters en illuminaties
• goudverf om laatste dingetjes af te maken op goudverfpagina's
• blaadjes/balkjes verven
• whitework
• penwerk
• vergulden
• schrijven > mits tekst uitgevogeld is

Word counts

We're counting words and looking how they will fit on the page.

For 1987 the original text has 39 lines of text in Times New Roman on an A4 sheet. After writing the first two pages we calculated that about 13 lines fit on a page (average of a page with illumination and a page with no decoration around it). This meant that we had room for about 54 lines of text, and so we were short of text.

I made up about 5 extra lines, so there's a total of 44 lines now. I've written to the end of page 3 and now have 9,5 lines left over for the last page. That means I can fit about 5 more extra lines on that page if it also fits 13 lines, and there is room for a total of 50 lines, not 54.

Update sept. 3rd: I finished the text for 1987, and changed my mind so many times about whether or not the text would fit, skipping text and then making up extra sentences that I lost track... The last sentence was a new one and ended exactly at the end of the last line...

Next I'm planning to start on 1993 (the year of the Green Knight). For this year we have 55 lines of text in Arial, which means more words on the page then for 1987. After looking at the previous year and how it fit on the page, I'll start out skipping words here and there to shorten the text a little.

Order of work

• gilding
• writing
• gild capitals
• painting colors
• whitework/penwork

Since gilding and writing are the bottlenecks, we won't be able to follow this ideal order of work for many pages, but this is what we aim for.

In preparation for the shire workshop, this means I'll try to do writing on the first pages of each year where there is a large illumination. Also, we'll do as much gilding as possible. And then start on the pages where these things are done, and if/when those are finished, we'll work in a less than ideal order...

Next time: do lots of guilding and writing. Take pictures of foliage pages in different stages (sketch, gesso, gold, paint, paint and whitework).

Also in preparation for the Shire workshop:

• check page numbering > geloven we wel.
• gather shells of paint
• writing page 1 van 1993, 1991, 1992
• gilding
• find pictures that were used for drafting illuminations

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.

History

We spent the evening working on the text, getting it ready for further editing. Quite a bit got done, lots more left to do...