Archery scroll, base coats

Okay, the scroll has been measured, it's been mocked up at least once, it's been measured, it's been written, and it's been sketched out. If we were gilding, now would be the time to add the shiny gold, but we're not, so... Now it's time to start laying in base color. Now is when the scroll really starts to look like a scroll.

Yellow ochre was not used in my exemplar, but as I mentioned before, this piece will actually be photocopied before being handed out, and gold doesn't copy well. I debated using a lighter yellow, but ochre looks more or less like gold when the light isn't hitting it quite right, and a brighter yellow would have been less convincing, I think.

I've also never worked with pink before, but the Luttrell Psalter is full of it, so I mixed up a shell full of enough paint to hopefully last me quite a while.

If you were wondering what I was talking about when I said I had made up a "shell" of paint... well, you take an actual small seashell, pour a little bit of binder into it (that's a bottle of gum arabic syrup on the top right), add a little bit of pigment (there's a vial of veridian green top center), and then stir. You keep adding pigment in small amounts and stirring, and when you reach the consistency of toothpaste, you let it dry, and now you have a shell full of paint. Just add water!

The dark green is the veridian, then I made up some veridian with white added, and after that I mixed a warm and a cool pink with the tube gouaches I had on hand. (Gouache: opaque watercolor, most similar to what was used in period.) As you saw in the previous post, that warm salmony sort of pink is going to get a lot of use.

Green added. This is a modern pigment, but it came closest in my collection to the warm blue-green that I found in the Luttrell Psalter.

What you don't see a lot of from pics where a stage is finished is the size of the brush strokes involved in filling in all that color. The brushes we scribes use are pretty small; I tend to use larger brushes than most, and I still am able to get strokes finer than pencil lines. So this first photo of the blue going in is an attempt to give you an idea of the effort involved. The second pic is the blue completed.

I also am really, really appreciating the quality of the online viewer for this manuscript, which has let me zoom in as far as I like to get an eye for the detail work that went into each page as well as clarifying what colors went where. On smaller images, I really thought the leaves on the top half of the left border were blue. Instead, a close look revealed that they are green. Consider the treasures we have available to us online nowadays! It's really wonderful, for those of us unlikely to get to see such manuscripts in person very often, or at all. (I'm guessing they don't trot out the Luttrell Psalter for just anyone who asks, for example.)

And here is my work done for the day; I finished up the pink and green in one day, and did the blue and red the next day. All told, blue and red took about three hours to do.

People often ask me how long it takes to put a scroll together, and I have two answers for that, which are both true. The real answer is "it depends", because each scroll is unique and some of them have more art than others. The honest answer is "I have no idea", because I rarely track my hours while I work. I only know that I wasn't hungry when I started this morning and I was ready for lunch when I finished! But if I had to guess, I'd say I spent about three to three and a half hours on the red and blue this morning. I think. Don't quote me, okay? It might have been less, because I did take time to go vote. I suppose it could have been only two and a half hours.

But that still puts me at roughly four to five hours for all the base colors, plus probably 1.5 to 2 hours for writing, plus an hour for laying out all the margins and guidelines to begin with. So I'm probably at about eight hours so far? And I'm only about halfway done. Once base colors are in, it's time for shading, followed by highlights and white work, followed by outlining everything. (Confession: I hate outlining. I do, because when you're that close to being done, you still have one step left that can ruin all your hard work up to that point, and you have to do it anyway. But man, when you get it right, it really brings the work to life!)

My next post will show the shading and white work.