Black Hours, continued

The last time I posted, I had only just gotten the first two lines of gold text into my scroll, and all was right with the world. I was young and naive and idealistic, and believed everything with this scroll was going to go as planned. 

That'll teach me to make plans. 

This particular piece of vellum that I'm working on was made with a process that the supplier is still refining, with the result that it had some imperfections I didn't spot until it was too late. The overall surface of the vellum was mostly fine, but it had some fatty or waxy spots that were a disaster to try and gild. Gold, if you may recall, loves to stick to oils and fats. So while the first few lines came out okay...

... after a while, I started encountering areas where the excess gold did not simply brush away from the vellum. 

There were also discolored areas where ther dye didn't quite take. I was less concerned about those, but wanted to give my supplier feedback (as he had requested, to help him refine his process).

Scraping excess gold meant that sometimes dye and waxy residue would also come off the vellum: 

And the sticking only got worse, as I got into a larger problem area than I had originally realized. 

To repair these areas, I had to take my scalpel and scrape gold away around each individual letter, a slow and painstaking process that resulted in many mistakes. At one point, I got so frustrated that I just gave up and erased the entire word, as you see below: 

If I had been thinking, I would have stopped, found a different approach, and started over on a different piece of vellum. Instead, I kept going. It was a learning experience if nothing else, right? If I ever encounter this problem again, I will definitely know how to fix it. 

The problem area kept expanding into my lines of text: 

And my excess gold flakes stuck to the page everywhere the waxy residue could be found, for example the right side margin here. 

I really felt like the lettering was getting ragged and uneven, being shaped as it was by a scalpel almost more than by a pen. My feedback expert,  however, insisted that it looked fine and I was being too hard on myself.  

Here's a close up of a badly damaged word, "Crown". The gilding size left a slightly raised shape that allowed me to see most of the letter shapes through the gold, so first I traced around them with the very tip of my scalpel blade: 

And then I would scrape away the excess little by little, revealing the word hidden underneath. 

Finally, I made it to the last line of text. You can just see it shining in black through the gilding adhesive here, as well as the "rex" and "regina" areas where the king and queen are expected to add their names. Ironically, I managed to escape the worst of the waxy areas and the final line mostly behaved itself. 

And finally, the full text block. 

Several days' worth of work, thankfully at an end. I expect the illumination to go much, much more quickly.

When I posted these photos to a scribes group on Facebook, a professional calligrapher asked me why I gilded it instead of writing with shell silver and gold. I slapped my forehead quietly, then responded that my understanding was that gilding like this was what they had done in period. Now I suspect that I'm wrong, and did all that work for nothing. 

Sigh. Learning experiences, man. Sometimes they kinda bite. 

The next piece I do in this style, owing to the nature of the dyed and sealed vellum being sort of waxy, I will use my Finetec/ Coliro mica based paints, and skip the actual gilding entirely. Doing that will completely avoid all the problems I encountered, as well as give me a more consistent look, because the gold in the text will match the gold in the border. My gold paint is slightly darker compared to the genuine gold, which looks quite pale in comparison.

My vellum supplier is actually quite happy with all the feedback I've given him, despite the frustrations, because it's told him a lot about his own process and ways he can improve upon it. He'll be sending me test swatches here in a couple of weeks for me to play with as I please. I'll probably work with pounce, no pounce, gilding, scraping, sanding, you name it, to put the pieces through their paces. 

As of today, I have actually started on the illumination, but I opted to save those pictures for another post. Hopefully I'll have something to show you on that front in a couple weeks' time. 

Thanks to everyone who follows this blog, and comments either here or elsewhere! I really appreciate it.