County scroll, part 4

Today was about resting my hand from all the calligraphy I'd been doing, and focusing on the future illumination. To refresh your memory, here are the images I'm working from, pulled from the Mac Durnan Gospels: 

I'm going to use the layout and figure on the right, including the interlaced birds, and knot work similar to the image on the left. I'm not interested in working with the key patterns (the zigzag decoration in the corners of the right image and along the sides of the left image), but the plan all along has been to get a bit excessive with the decoration on this one, so I'll be placing genuine amethysts in the four corners of the piece instead. I'll also be using gold leaf, white gold leaf, and copper leaf which are all entirely absent from the original source material. Copper itself was never used in manuscript illumination, but it was used in some other artifacts from the period, and it looks really cool, so I'll be incorporating it anyway. 

I got lucky, and discovered that the image I have in mind will fit perfectly on my graph paper. I was able to take yesterday's sketch and translate it to the graph paper with just a couple measurements to keep it on track. 

Some of the angles aren't quite right, but I was much more concerned with the overall balance of the figure, and especially with all the outlining around the figure's clothing. Those are likely going to be done in gold, and the arrow in white gold, so getting them placed correctly and a consistent width throughout will be crucial.

I'm pretty happy with that figure, so next it was time to test drive some knots and zoomorphs. The knots themselves, thankfully, are allowed to be pretty simple, and critters themselves are often less complicated than they look. So here's what I came up with after about an hour's worth of noodling around: 

The dragons are the symbol of my "kingdom" in the SCA, and adding a seal with our kingdom's heraldry on it is one way of making a scroll "official", so the bottom dragon will be modified somewhat to try and fit the heraldic elements in. I'm a little concerned that doing so will take away from the Celtic look of the piece, but it should be okay. 

The birds took longer to work out than the dragon, mainly because of their tails. In the end I resorted to pulling out my book on Celtic knot work and zoomorphs, and modified a bird from the Lindisfarne Gospels. It still looks similar enough to the one shown in my source that I'm not worried about ruining the authentic look of the piece. (Honestly, the heraldry worries me more.)

And that was it for today! I'm pretty pleased with my progress so far and looking forward to tomorrow. My next steps are to ask around and get advice for tracing this image with the use of a light board, which I've never done before. Tracing was definitely done in period, and having to redraw this image after I've already gotten it right once seems like work I can afford to avoid, so I'm hoping my vellum will be translucent enough to behave when I try it. 

As always, feel free to leave a comment or ask a question!