The differences are subtle on this camera, partly because of the lighting, but I'm really pleased with how much cleaner everything looks now.
At long last, it was time to say goodbye to and put away all these tools: from left to right, my agate "dog tooth" burnisher, one of the brushes I used for painting miniatum, my soft brush for getting rid of excess leaf, and my reverse elbow tweezers for handling leaf. They are all resting on a glassine envelope, which is used in burnishing as a barrier between the leaf and the burnisher so you don't rub the leaf right back off the page, and surrounded by my bottle of miniatum and three scrap containers full of copper, 12-karat white gold, and 23-karat gold.
Even though I was ready to paint, first I had some debate about what colors to use before I could start. My source materials are not at the best resolution, nor, I suspect, at the best color faithfulness to the original manuscript. I've seen the same St. Matthew page in several different brightness levels across the internet, for example, and sometimes his robe looks red and other times more of a burgundy purple. I had to settle on a green shade, and I had to talk myself out of using any blue, because the sources didn't have any. (It was really tempting to use anyway because it would have looked excellent next to these metals. Oh well.)
Instead I got to use a nice obnoxious pink.
In all the photos that follow, my colors look artificially dark, due to the camera dimming the exposure because of light reflecting off all that metal. Here's what the pink and green I did today actually look like (yes, those are seashells, long story) :
Compare that to how dark the green is in these close ups, where it can be mistaken for black if you didn't know any better.
I promise, it looks better in person. You can see how filling in the bodies of the critters makes all that knotwork suddenly make sense, though. And the kingdom seal is going to look nifty done in this style.
Just about the only photo I got that even comes close to showing the colors accurately was of the right hand border around the text, where I'm using color to help the knotwork band stand out a little.
Man, that is a bubblegum pink, isn't it? In addition to these colors, I'll be using an equally obnoxious orangey yellow, reddish orange, red, the burgundy sort of purple I already mentioned, white, and brown. It's a very limited palette, with no shading to speak of. For the most part I'll just be filling in the colors where they belong, adding minor detail in only a few areas, and then outlining. The outlining will probably take longer than the painting itself.
Still, I'm happy to have put gilding behind me for this piece! As much as I enjoy gilding ordinarily, and as much as I've learned from this go-round, this step has gone on long enough.
Thanks as always for your questions and comments, whether it's here on my blog or via Facebook, Tumblr, Discord, or any of the other places I share these posts. I appreciate the chance to talk about my work.
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