Sunday, May 6, 2018

Archery scroll: research and prep


Day 2 of the archery scroll project. Here are some source pics of the art I'll be adding to the scroll, from the Luttrell Psalter...

Also the thing on the bottom left, for new scribes and non scribes, is a little godsend called an Ames lettering guide. It lets you make rows and rows of evenly spaced guidelines without having to take all day to do it. It's an essential part of my kit! (I mean, there might be scribes who don't need one of these, but I'm sure not one of them.)

There are steps and work that go into a scroll that a recipient never really gets to see, and research is a big part of that. For this piece, I debated whether I wanted to go early period or later, for ease of decoration, and eventually opted for the Luttrell Psalter because it's from right in the middle of period archery, about the 1300s. Some archers go later and some earlier, so it felt like meeting in the middle would be a good compromise.



So here's the second mockup I did (I didn't take any pics of the first). Mockups are important to help you get a feel for how the text is going to flow and fit onto the page. In this case, the first mockup I did made it clear that not all of Lady Meadhbh's words were going to fit, so I had to go through and figure out what I could sacrifice and still have the piece make sense. But when I was done, I really liked the flow of it and the way that some of the lines gave me gaps at the end. The Luttrell Psalter and a lot of other manuscripts fill those gaps with line enders (not sure if that's the technical term or not), decorated fills that can be abstract or have whimsical little beasties inside.





I have a sneaking suspicion that the original source material is even bigger than the letters I used here. If you remember day 1, when I was testing out filigree? Here's what it looks like when drawn at its proper size. Again, these are just in pencil, just a test run of what I will do later. In the final piece, the capitals will be either blue or gold, and the filigree will be in red, blue, or purple.


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