First "Black Hours" piece

It's time for me to gear up for an artistic challenge: a scroll done in the style of the Sforza Black Hours.

In case you're wondering "What's a Sforza Black Hours?", I will tell you that there was a short-lived fad of conspicuous consumption among the filthy rich of the Flemish courts in around the 1480s, wherein their Books of Hours were made on pages that had been dyed black. The lettering, rather than being done in ink, was made by gilding with silver and gold. The paints were accented with more of the same; the effect was striking, especially to the modern eye.

Because of the way that black Books of Hours were made, most of them deteriorated badly within a relatively short time; either the vellum disintegrated as a result of the dye used, or the page was blackened with carbon instead, and this caused the paint to flake off. There are now only seven extant examples of black hours in existence, and all of them are damaged. One, the "Sforza" Black Hours, was in such poor condition that the book was dismantled completely, and its pages preserved between sheets of glass, in order to save it.

Here are three examples of Black Hours books: the New York Hispanic Society Black Hours, the Morgan Black Hours, and the Sforza Black Hours. (Several more images of the Sforza are also available here.) They are all noticeably distinct from one another in their border decoration, which means that as an artist, I have a lot of room to play if I decide I want to work on a black ground to create a piece. Ultimately, I chose to attempt to imitate the Sforza Black Hours, because it's got more range of color than the others.

This scroll is going to be an overdue award for a lady in my SCA kingdom, which means that certain wording is required, which means I need to test the text out and make sure I get everything to fit in the text block. Here's a test of the wording and the first mockup; I ended up doing three mockups before I was really satisfied with the spacing.



Next, it was time to test the gilding on the black vellum. I'm not really worried about gold sticking to my gilding size, but this particular sheet of vellum is a little "waxy" from leftover fats from the vellum-making process, and I wanted to be sure everything would still look good. I also wanted to make sure I could write with the gilding size and not have it come out too blobby or unreadable because it's too thin compared to my usual inks.



Test writing with the gilding size




Here it is, gilded with 12-karat white gold, and I think it looks all right. I could wish for a little cleaner thin lines in the letters themselves, but all in all this is definitely workable.

Finally, it was time to test the paints themselves and make sure that they would show up against the black, and also make sure I could get the style right. With vine work, I have a tendency to think everything is overcrowded when it's really not, with the result that my stuff ends up being too open. This time, though, I think I got it just right.




The only trouble I had with paints was with my first blue choice, which was too dark and didn't show against the black. Adding a smidgen of white to brighten it was all I needed to do.

The gold and silver here are mica-based paints from Coliro, formerly known as Finetec. They sell individual colors for about $5 a pan, and have a broad palette of metallic and pearl colors in most shades of the rainbow. Most SCA scribes are only interested in their silver and gold, of which they have several shades, but I do know of one scribe who creates her Black Hours scrolls entirely in metallic paints in multiple colors, for effect.

So, that's the past several days of preparation. Today I went ahead and prepared the sheet of vellum for writing, trying to get some more of that waxy residue off of it, then marked my margins and lines for the text block, and gilded my first bit of text.



That looks pretty promising to me, what do you think?

I look forward to your comments and questions!