This stage actually looks really boring, and it kinda is, but it's also precision work that is crucial to everything that comes after. If your margins are crooked, everything that comes after will be off-kilter too.
Still, it's not exactly exciting to look at, is it?
Vellum, unlike paper, does not like to lie flat. Ever. I've never met a sheet of genuine vellum that didn't buckle or cockle at least a little. This makes trying to draw straight lines on it something of a challenge. One way I've found around that is to pick one corner as your starting point, and measure everything relative to that point, rather than relative to your subsequent margins. It seemed to have mostly worked on this sheet.
Using a lettering guide on a substrate that won't lie flat is still a real pain, though.
Next, I set up my slope-slash-light board, basically an adjustable desktop easel with a sheet of white plexiglas and a fluorescent light that goes underneath. I don't use it often, but I've already explained about using a tracing template for this project.
Getting the straight lines on my vellum to line up with the straight lines on my template was, again, a bit of a challenge. But I got close enough that I was able to start tracing without too much trouble. So yay for that, I guess!
So he is the day's work: a sheet of vellum with lots of pencil marks on it.
Tomorrow I'll trace the second template, which creates the border around the text block, and then I'll be ready to break out the ink and do some real calligraphy!
And after that, I promise you, things will get very interesting indeed.
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