And here we are at the next to last stage of most illumination, the white work. Laying in the base colors is fun if a little boring, shading helps to bring the image to life and give it depth, and white work is where things really begin to dance. You're adding highlights in some areas, and in others just whimsical decoration, but in every area the illumination really starts to look like a finished product rather than a flat layer of color.
So without further ado, here's the scroll with the completed white work on it, followed as always by lots of detail pictures.
I absolutely love looking at this capital D and could do a whole slide show just on its development. What can I say? It turned out really well at every stage, apart from some bobbles in the gilding.
This wonky sort-of-owl critter is straight out of the original source material, with the exceptions that the crest is a greyhound head rather than a weird scallop shape, and I used paint rather than metal to show the helm and the "silver" and "gold" of the coat of arms. The client decided that he didn't want to watch the bright silver tarnish over time, and I can't blame him.
Let's show off a few pics of the vines throughout the page... the white really makes them leap off the page compared to what they look like without it.
And then there's the main border itself, where you can see that even the base pink has white decoration on it.
The lesser capital has the chalice that is the symbol of my client's award, and also shows a test run of the gold tooling that I'll be using on the entire piece later on. There's also a nice closeup of the filigree work on the little R there at the bottom.
And finally, there are the skinny little line-enders that fill out the text block into a nice rectangle and take care of gaps in the wording.
As sharp as these are starting to look, there's still the outlining to do, which would ordinarily be the final step, and then on this piece, there's gold tooling to finally finish out the decoration. And then it will be done! I'm very excited to show you those steps in upcoming posts.
As always, if you like what you see here, feel free to drop a couple bucks into the tip jar, labeled "Buy Me A Coffee" up there on the right side of the page. Cheers, and see you next time!
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