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