I decided that the best way to put all the drawing onto the vellum, once I reach that stage, will be to trace it. Tracing was absolutely done in period, but I myself have never really done it before, even though I have a passable light board. Still, knot work and zoomorphs require a bit of precision to construct, and I didn't want to have to freehand them onto the vellum over and over until I got them right. That meant I needed to create a tracing template.
Of course, creating the template meant I would need to sketch the knots and the critters several times anyway, until I got the ones I wanted. But I could do that on mt graph paper as many times as I wanted, and once I was happy with each individual drawing, I could trace it onto my template, right where it belonged, and then stop worrying about it.
So here are a few pics of the process sketches, and the template itself as it developed.
Figure and knots traced into place on the template.
I originally expected to use tracing paper for this, but while looking for that I found a pad of clear "Dura-Lar", which is meant to be used for creating transparencies. I had bought a pad ages ago, in order to cut a custom stencil for another project. Honestly, it's even better than tracing paper! The markers won't bleed, and there's nothing to block light coming up through my light board.
It took several tries to get the birds to turn out the way I wanted. I had to create two, because I needed one facing left and another facing right. Here are three attempts:
Once I was happy with a bird, I inked it with an ordinary ballpoint pen to clean up the pencil lines, then traced it onto the template with sharpie.
Finally it was time to work on the dragons that will go at the top and bottom of the border. That took several tries, too:
The dragons are modified off of critters found on a 12th century artifact known as the Cross of Cong. I needed to tweak their tails several times to fill in the white space in the middle around their elongated bodies, and the one that will go on the bottom also needed room for the additional elements that make up the Middle Kingdom seal, but I finally got them right.
There's the finished template, eight hours later! The corners look pretty bare in comparison right now, but that's where I plan to put semiprecious gemstones, so I'm not too worried about them seeming plain once the piece is finished.
I may go ahead and create a second template tomorrow, to cover the much simpler border that will go around the text block. Or I may throw caution to the wind and just freehand that directly onto the vellum; as useful as I can tell this technique will be, it's also pretty time consuming, and I'd really like to get on with things sooner rather than later. I'm expecting the border to be pretty simple, in any case. Depending on how it looks all laid out, I may just fill it in with plain color and not do anything else. More likely, though, I'll end up doing a very simple knot work band around the text block.
As always, questions and comments are welcome and encouraged!
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