anonymous asked:
Can you tell us about how you got into calligraphy and gilding? I find it really interesting but I’m not sure where to start!
Here follows my answer.
Oh, wow! Well, hmm. I was first introduced to calligraphy in art class in like 8th grade, but I didn’t come back to it until I became a member of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). The Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to learning about the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, but ALSO any culture that would have had contact with Europe during that time; and they’ve also recently removed their “earliest time period” cutoff, so now we also have ancient Romans and Iron Age Celts running around and playing. We dance the dances, eat the foods, and study the arts and sciences of the time period. It’s pretty romanticized, though, I mean, we tend to avoid things like plagues and witch burnings, and just generally try to recreate the best parts of those cultures; we sometimes call it “the Middle Ages as they should have been”.
Anyway. In the Society, it being pretty much all volunteer-operated, you can get recognition for your service to the organization or your local chapter or whatever, or you can also earn awards for your skills in various arts, crafts, or sports. When that happens, the “king and queen” of your regional area (your “kingdom”) hold a court, and call you and other people up one at a time to receive an award certificate called a scroll. A court herald reads them aloud, it’s all nice and ceremonial and a great way to honor people’s contributions.
We’re not going to print our award certificates off on the computer, thank you very much. :) That’s where scribes come in. I am a scribe.
There’s a whole scribal NETWORK of volunteers and coordinators, a whole system of figuring out who’s going to be awarded in the upcoming court, how many scrolls to produce, assigning those scrolls to various scribes, and collecting them when they’re done. Most of the time you have a week or two to complete your assignment; sometimes, however, the king and queen will spontaneously decide to award someone the day of their event, and a scroll has to be whipped up on short notice. This is jokingly referred to as “combat scribing”.
But yeah. I am a scribe. I made my first award scroll for the SCA in April of 2000, and I’ve been scribing off and on ever since. Lately I do fewer court scrolls or combat scrolls, and more things off the backlog (our backlog isn’t too extensive where I live, but sometimes a person gets an award and there wasn’t time to make their scroll, or the scribe it was assigned to was sick and couldn’t do it, or whatever). I also take commissions for things like poems, religious texts, wedding vows, and nifty stuff like that.
Outside of the scroll industry, some scribes also participate in various non-award-certificate projects, too, like making their own books or whatever. I’ve been part of a 75-person, five-year project called Calf to Codex, where we crafted a book completely from scratch, using donated deer hides to turn into parchment, authentic pigments that would have been used in the Middle Ages, ink made according to a period recipe, goose quills for pens, you name it. I wasn’t even allowed to use a pencil to sketch things; I was given a stick of lead!
And. It’s a little bit meta, but I’ve also earned awards for my skill and service in crafting awards. :) I’m not as good as some people in the Society, but I’m definitely not bad, either.
As for where to start, well, do you want to be part of a medieval organization and crank out certificates? Or does modern calligraphy interest you more? Or maybe you’re less of a “pen person” and more of a “brush person”, meaning you’d rather paint the decoration than write the text. I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of people tend to prefer one or the other, rather than doing both when they first start out. Is it specifically European (or Arabic! or Hebrew!), write-with-a-quill calligraphy that interests you, or do you think you could get into Asian write-with-a-brush calligraphy?
I’m useless at brush calligraphy, so I can’t really help you there, but I’d be happy to give you tips for just about anything else.
Oh! You asked about gilding, too. Gilding is a whole separate skill. Gold leaf is SUPER thin and lightweight, much lighter than even tissue paper, and takes patience and a gentle touch to get used to manipulating. There are things you can do to make it easier, and it’s not something I’ll tell you not to try, because it’s gorgeous - just be aware you may want to wait a bit to develop your skills before you tackle working with real gold.
Tell me more! Or visit my chat window. Let’s talk about what you want to do, and I’ll try to point you in the right direction.
And thanks SO MUCH for this ask! I love to talk about this stuff, as you can plainly see. :)
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