Black hours commission, September 2020

The "Black Hours" refers to manuscripts created during a narrow time period, around 1470-1480 if I remember right, that were the product of a short-lived fad to show off both how pious you were and also how filthy rich. The pages were black vellum, which is where they get their name, and the "ink" used to write on them was silver and gold. There are only seven surviving examples of Black Hours manuscripts (only really three online that I could find), because the different options for turning the pages black would either cause the page to eventually disintegrate, or would cause the paint to flake off. All the surviving Black Hours pages are damaged to some degree or another; one book, the Sforza Black Hours, was so fragile that in order to preserve it at all, conservators had to completely dismantle the book and seal each page between sheets of glass.

But boy are they still pretty to look at. Here's a link to a seller of facsimile manuscripts, with some great zoomable images for study. The modern eye finds them just as striking now as they no doubt were six hundred years ago, and they make for a popular topic when I teach the class on the painting technique, as well as very popular commission requests.

Here's one I completed in September. The client wanted a quote from Walt Whitman: "Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you."

As always, the calligraphy goes first, followed by sketching the layout. I followed the exemplar pretty closely; it's a very "busy" style in the border and I tend to shy away and leave things too open if left to my own devices.

I've had several people ask if I'm using a special pencil to sketch my design, but as it turns out, plain old graphite is shiny enough that it shows up just fine on black paper! That's a regular, standard-issue, office supply mechanical pencil there, the kind you can buy in a pack of ten. I'm not pressing hard, I'm not using a special lead, I'm just sketching and it shows up just fine.

Here are a couple of closeup shots for the details that the client wanted me to include. She really likes nature, nymphs, and fairies, and also thought that a sunburst would be a perfect thing to include since the quote references sunshine.

There's a fairy in there, if you can pick it out... its wings are meant to be butterfly wings, but the proportions aren't quite right. I don't end up fixing that until later, in the painting stage.

Can you see the bird and its chicks? I promise it is easier to make out once it's colored in.

Finally it was time to start the coloring; I always work largest to smallest, and that usually means starting with the silver and gold acanthus leaves.

The nymphs suddenly become a lot easier to spot!

After silver comes gold:

I am very, very pleased with how that sunburst came out. Shading with a metallic color is hard, because you can't add white or anything else to lighten its intensity. You have to thin it down with water instead, and then let the paint build in opacity as you layer it, while trying not to over-wet the paper or have blobby, imprecise paint marks. It's more of a watercolor technique, I think, than a gouache technique (gouaches are meant to be opaque, not translucent).

After that, it was time for the regular colors:

One reason I enjoy the scribal arts so much is because every piece so far has been a learning experience. I haven't gotten bored with repetition very often at all in the past twenty years. That little bunny rabbit there? Totally new techniques for me with mixing paint (I am lazy, and prefer to just use straight colors without having to blend anything) and shading.

Of course, into every piece a little "eh" must fall, so here is the fairy that didn't turn out quite right:

The wings aren't proportioned quite right and the decoration is.... not that great. I manage to fix the wing proportions a little farther along, but for now let's distract ourselves with this lovely bird in its nest, instead.

A neat feature of this particular Black Hours book was that they included mini-scenes in the margins of the page, in little roundels at the side and bottom. The bottom one, as you saw, includes that sunburst. Here is the side:

You know how when you're a kid you tend to draw the same horse over and over, or the same cat, or whatever? I tend to draw the same tree almost all the time, so this one wasn't too difficult. I especially like how the black background is visible through the leaves.

Also, I told you I'd finally do something about that fairy's wing proportions...

The colors are still... not that great, in my opinion, but at least the wings no longer look like they were put on upside down.

So here we are so far:

The final step for each of these was to add delicate silver and gold highlights to them, to help tie them to the rest of the border. Otherwise, the duller "plain" colors might look like holes in the overall shiny effect.

I especially like how the silver brings out the contrast on the bird's darker blue and purple tones, which I'd feared might get lost against the black background.

Now that I've gotten the difficult stuff out of the way, it's time to tackle the flowers, fruit, and leaves throughout the border. This is just a matter of pulling out some single colors and not having to blend anything, and it goes surprisingly quickly.

Blue and white were first; I could have started with any color, really, and have in the past, but this time I was in the mood for blue and white:

Then it was time for red and green:

So the overall effect looks like this. The border is really starting to come together!

And yet, still not finished. Now that the base colors have been added, they will also get the silver and gold highlight treatment. Then after that, we lay in all the stems and tendrils in gold and silver, then fill in any previously unnoticed gaps or open spaces with squiggles and starbursts (or squashed spiders, depending what you want to call them). Click the image below, and if you're on a desktop or laptop, it should open in a separate window, where you can click again to zoom in on it.

Here are a few closeups where you can see what I'm talking about with the background fills, the squiggles and starbursts. There's also a hidden honeybee, if you look closely.

The rabbit's gold highlights turned out great, and there's another honeybee in this picture. The piece has a total of four hidden bees, just for fun.

And the unveiling, the finished piece with all my pencil marks erased. The only thing I did after this was add my signature on the bottom, and mail it to the client, who tells me she absolutely loves it.

I am thrilled to report that my commissions queue is actually growing! After this piece, which was completed in September, I did another Black Hours, which I'll post about in another week or so, that was done in October. For a change of pace, I'm currently working on a piece modeled after manuscripts from the 1100s, so, much earlier and visually different from this style, and then after that I'll be replacing someone's old diploma that got wet and went moldy.

Every piece is a new learning experience.

Changes a-comin'

 Hello all,

I wanted to let you all know that I have set up a small shop and commissions page over on Ko-fi.com - you may have noticed the button off to the right of my posts (only visible in web view, not mobile view). Ko-fi was originally designed to serve as a sort of "tip jar" for creators and their supporters, who might wish to show appreciation from time to time even if they couldn't afford a large donation or purchase. Ko-fi has since expanded their services to allow me to sell work through their site. With my free membership,  they take a small commission from every purchase, but it's really minor and I don't mind paying it to support them. There are no ads and they don't collect your data in any way, as far as I know.

I also wanted to get feedback from you about the possibility of moving this blog over to Wordpress. I've never used Wordpress before, but I've heard good things; most importantly, I've heard that it's really easy to subscribe to a Wordpress blog and be notified when a new post comes out. It's my hope that I could have a little bit cleaner look to the blog, with a little more ease in finding things in mobile view (on my current blog, post tags are only visible in web view, for example), and also build something of a subscriber base.

Is that something that people might be interested in?

In the meantime, we are well, the new house construction is coming along steadily, and I've been hired but not yet started at a new job. I'm writing lots and making art that makes me happy, so all in all, life is pretty good.

I hope you are well, too. Be safe, and be kind.

Gilding experiments

Re-establishing my scribal kit after the fire is going to take time, but I've been doing it in stages, bit by bit, over the past several weeks. Some of the parts I've replaced have been my gilding supplies. I've always enjoyed gilding, as I know you've read if you follow this blog at all, but most of the materials I've used have been fairly modern. I have had varying degrees of luck using anything period, but I think I may have finally hit the jackpot on a material that's as close to period as I want to get.

This stuff is a recipe for gilding gesso (not the same thing as painter's gesso) made by Jerry Tresser and available either at his website or through John Neal, Bookseller. It is based off the period recipe in Cennini's "Il Libro dell' Arte", but replaces the highly toxic white lead of that recipe with non-toxic titanium white. It goes on nice and thick and dries raised, as it is supposed to. However, in the teardrop above (less so in the leaf below), if you look at the center you can see a bit of a dimple where it shrank somewhat as it dried. Sigh. With a lot of gilding materials, this is a flaw in the material itself, but I will confess that it's also a flaw in my own technique. I tend to "glop first" and put all the gesso down at once, and hope for the best. This is not the best. Still pretty good though! Apart from the dimple, this gesso did dry smooth and not wrinkly like you might recall the miniatum does that I used in my last big raised-gilding project. Gold leaf is thin enough that it will show every flaw and texture in the surface below it, which can be fun when you're flat gilding on paper and the grain shows through, but less so on raised gilding where you're hoping for a mirror-like finish.

Even so, I do like how I'm able to tease the gesso into corners and sharp points, as on the leaf above.

Here's a picture of the teardop and a dot after gilding; the flaw in my technique meant that I didn't wait long enough for the gesso to dry, and had to burnish very gently and carefully. The edges of the gesso were dryer than the center, and would not take the gold as well. Another probable cause of the problem was my refusal to paint a thin layer down first, allow that to dry a bit, then paint the thick layer over it. Again, this is more of a flaw in my technique than with the material.

Even with those flaws, the gold is still smooth and shiny, where it did stick.

So above, here's the same card a day later. I wrote dates next to each of the samples, and made a second attempt at gilding the older ones, labeled 4-28. Taking more time to allow the gesso to dry completely, burnishing a little harder, and taking a little more care gave me good results! There are still dimples, but with this particular gesso I likely would have been able to smooth them out with a scalpel if I had tried it. For the 4-29 samples, however, I painted a thin layer of gesso, let it dry for an hour (it darkens somewhat as it dries and goes matte instead of shiny), then went ahead and painted the thicker layer over the top. This is probably still a little impatient on my part, because the advice I've heard is to allow many thin layers to build up, rather than glop it all on as I prefer... but darn it, the technique this time worked beautifully. No dimples, although for some reason my second dot dried less as a rounded dome and more as a disk with raised edges. I'm still happy with it. The teardrop was great and the leaf made me happy as well.

Now for the magic part of this material:

You can burnish the gesso. Look at the teardrop above, which I burnished, compared to the dot and leaf which I didn't. Just look at how shiny that thing is! Can you guess how amazing that finish is going to look with gold on it? I got very very excited, and had to show the picture to everyone on Facebook, and the card to everyone in the house, here in quarantine lockdown.

Gilding all three new areas turned out to work better than the first attempts, too. I let them all sit overnight to dry, at least twelve hours I think, but less than twenty-four, and had zero problems with the gold not sticking to the edges. Whether that's because it was a rainy day, because I had painted a thin layer down first, or because I was able to press the gold down a little harder, I'm not sure. 

I still want to obtain a hollow reed "breathing tube" so I don't risk dripping saliva on the page or touching my lips (and their greasy lip balm) to the artwork. But that's for later.

And now for the comparison. Look at the drop on the left, which was burnished, and contrast it with the one on the right, which was not. They're both shiny and satisfying, I'm not at all unhappy with either of them! But the one on the right has an ever-so-slight grainy look to it, a bit like velvet almost, while the one on the left is extremely smooth. That's the difference that burnishing makes. Ideally, you should be able to see your reflection (albeit distorted) in a finished piece of gilding. You're also supposed to be able to burnish the gold directly rather than through glassine paper, to achieve the highest polish possible. 

I've never achieved either of those until the day I did these. I could literally see my face in the upper leaf on the left. Of course, something like that doesn't photograph well, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but it was amazing and I was thrilled.

Finally, I had one last experiment I wanted to try. I've done tooled gilding before, but that was over miniatum. That medium dries sort of soft, and was relatively easy to poke dimples into with a stylus. I wanted to see if it would be possible to tool gesso that had dried for two days and was hard, or if I would need to work it while it was still soft (and then have to figure out when was the right level of softness so as not to ruin it). I haven't replaced my styluses yet, but I did have a mechanical pencil that I decided to use to test the effect. The drop on the right got a row of dots courtesy of the end of the pencil (no lead), and they took surprisingly well. The gesso seems to require harder pressure to get the dots to go, which was about what I expected, but it did not crack or flake off the page as I feared it might.

All in all, this entire experiment was a success at every step. I learned a lot about how the gesso behaves, and got better results with it than I have with any modern recipe raised gilding medium, ever. I did also buy some of Mr. Tresser's flat gilding size, but I haven't tested it yet. I look forward to seeing how it behaves! In the meantime, it's been a week and I'm still glowing with how well this all turned out.

I hope you're all enjoying your quarantine, or the relaxing of restrictions depending where you live. Be safe, and be creative!

Online calligraphy and illumination class

It's been a bit since I posted. A house fire will do that, disrupt your routine a bit until you can get your feet back under you again.

But! I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about a thing that is happening now that my feet are mostly back under me again. I've restocked my art supplies, I have a little table space, and with the COVID quarantine, I have an excuse to teach an online class. In a way, if all goes well, this should work even better than an in-person class, since you all will get to watch over my shoulder while I work.

On Saturday, April 18, 2020, starting at 2pm Eastern time (US), I will be hosted on the Facebook page "RUM Community" in a three-hour demonstration of how to lay out an SCA scroll from start to finish. If all goes well, I'll actually manage to mostly finish the scroll in the allotted time frame! (Odds are actually slim, but I'm going to try!)

If you choose to follow along, we'll be creating a piece in this style:

The class will cover layout and margins, how to use a lettering guide, a bit on left-handed calligraphy, and we might go into selecting a good alphabet for your scroll. Then we'll cover this surprisingly quick illumination style from the late 1400s, some recommendations on tools and materials, and finish with the importance of outlining even though it's tedious.

If you want to follow along, you'll need:

• Paper, any size, preferably heavy paper like "Bristol board" or heavy watercolor paper. I'll be using 11x14 inches, but a lot of scrolls are done in 9x12, or even 8x10, so don't fret too much about that.
• Pencil
• Ruler
• If you own a lettering guide, I can show you how to use it.
• For the calligraphy, a pen and ink; whatever size nib that is reasonable will be fine. I'll be using a Mitchell 3.5
• Ideally also a pointy-nib pen like a crow quill or "mapping" pen for outlining stuff later.
• For the illumination, definitely red, blue, and green paint, probably also white, a little bit of yellow might not be a bad idea, and then something gold and shiny if you have it.
• A fine small brush, but don't go overboard. A 10/0 is overboard. You'll want something that will let you do all the fill in work as well as all the detailing. A 0 or even a 1 would work well. I'll probably try and get away with a 3 or a 4!

There are tools I still haven't replaced quite yet, so some of what I discuss will not be demonstrated, but in three hours I hope to be able to take you from start to finish on a piece this size.

The class will be hosted on Zoom, and hopefully also Facebook Live assuming the tech behaves. I'm also hoping that my setup will let people see my work and not just the top of my head while I work!

Watch this space for more information about another, shorter class to be held on Wednesday, April 29 at 7pm. That one will just talk about acanthus leaf illumination, and be done on a single Artist Trading Card.

Hope to see people in about a week's time!

Answering a question

I was thrilled to receive this question in my Tumblr ask box sometime last week:

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. :)

New developments

If you've been following the blog recently, you may have gotten used to me updating every couple of days as I work on the "County scroll" that is my latest scribal assignment for the SCA. If that's the case, you've probably also noticed that I haven't updated in a few days. That's because I haven't worked on the scroll since this past weekend... and that is because I got sidetracked by another project that I'm getting more and more excited about.

The Art Museum of Greater Lafayette offers classes to the wider community, and as of yesterday, I've submitted a proposal to present a once-a-month, single-session, three-hour workshop on basic calligraphy and illumination. Their summer session starts in May, and if there's enough demand, I'll be presenting the workshop in May, June, July, and August. I've spent the past week preparing that workshop (instead of gilding), and an additional course which I may teach in the fall, if there is enough demand.

The workshop itself is pretty straightforward; participants will learn the basics of calligraphy and one alphabet, select a quotation they like (I'll be supplying quotes from Walt Whitman, but they can choose anything they want), and write that on a bookmark. Then they'll paint and decorate the first initial of the quote, for an introduction to illumination. The class will be open to anyone ages 13 and up, with a minimum class size of three and a max of ten, so that I can be sure I'm able to devote my attention to everyone who needs it.

Here's an example of the alphabet, and the illumination style we'll be looking at:

And don't worry, we will be using gold paint instead of actual gilding supplies, and high-quality calligraphy markers rather than dip pens or quills. This is an introductory workshop, after all! No grades, no pressure, just hopefully a good time and a little bit of learning.

I'm not a professional, certified teacher; I didn't go to college for an education degree. But I do at least know enough about this topic, and have enough experience with public speaking and demonstrating in multiple disciplines, that I should be able to keep the workshop engaging and accessible for everyone.

I know at least one person who has promised to sign up, which is also exciting! Here's hoping I get more. 

As for the county scroll, I'll be back to that this weekend, no worries. 

Cheers! 

Chapter 7! Yay!

Hello all, this is just a quick post because I haven't written in a while; I'm still working on the banners, but another project I've been neglecting has finally gotten some progress on it!

You may have heard that I'm working on an original novel, but the truth is, I had stalled out in Chapter 6 for several weeks. However, I found my way past a little hump of boredom that was hiding there, finished the chapter, and was even able to write an additional chapter past that. Yay!

If anyone is interested in reading the story as it progresses, I'd love feedback to help me shape it. If not, that's fine, too. I need to have an audience to sell it to once it's finished, after all.

Have a great week!

Final steps - Bran's Chalice scroll 4

Here we are at the finish! The final step on almost any scroll is the outlining. It takes a long time and can be tedious, but the final result is well worth it.

Here's the first picture; if you look closely you can see that top half of the border has not yet been outlined, while the bottom has. It just makes the edges that much more crisp and helps clean up the overall appearance. The leaves and vine also get a bit of separation from the background. I don't really like the phrase "makes it pop" but, well, that's what it does.

And here is the border with the outlining complete. You also can see some of the filigree that I added to the smaller capitals.

More of the filigree and a better look at the smaller initial. The black chalice inside the letter is the badge of the award that the client earned.

The kingdom seal...

Some of the line enders. Now, when I first started on this piece, I forgot that I needed to gild two of the line enders, so I went back and used a flat adhesive rather than the miniatum, which gives a raised finish. Luckily, the parchment was a forgiving enough surface that I was still able to texture the gold, which you can see in the middle line ender.

And of course, the big initial D at the beginning of the piece, because I can never get enough of how well it turned out. I'm not sure if the outlining here is really visible, since it's around the dark blue and red, but you can see it around the outer gold "trim" as well.

And then it was time to finally texture the gold! If you live in the US, Michael's carries "embossing styluses" in a three-pack for five dollars. The smallest one is the only one I have used so far, but five dollars for a single tool is still a good price, let alone three.

The way I did was first to practice with a pencil, to get a feel for how to freehand the vine shapes. I've heard that other artists use a stencil and get the shape they want from that, which would be a terrific technique for a symmetrical design, but the Luttrell Psalter is more organic in layout. Hence the freehand drawing. Usually when I'm drawing ivy, I just sketch in a vine, drop leaves on it, and then draw the outer edges, but you can't do that with gold. There's no erasing a dimple in the metal once you've placed it. Practice with pencil first on paper to get the hang of it! 

The way it worked best for me was to draw the line that made up the inside of the curve and leaf shape, and then go back and draw the outside of the curve as it sweeps in and becomes the inside of the next section of vine. I don't know if that makes sense. It would probably be better if I had video of the technique, but I don't.

Once practice was out of the way, I sort of eyeballed the shape of the gold to see where leaves would fit best. Then I started "drawing" them in by pressing dots into the gold in a curving line, anywhere I wanted the vine to be. If you do this, take your time, give yourself space for the leaves and for the outer curve of vine around the leaves, and keep an eye on your available space. I ended up adding a couple of extra curls here and there to fill in blank areas.

After the vine is drawn, you go back and fill in the background with lots and lots and lots of dimples. It's a little tedious, actually, yet painstaking at the same time, because you do want to pay attention so that the dimples are evenly spaced, or so that you don't over-treat an area and maybe break through the gold. As far as I can tell, I didn't do that, so maybe it's not as much of a worry as I think it is.

Finally, I went back and outlined my vines one last time, pressing a little harder than the background dimples, to help the vines stand out just a little bit more. And the result on that was terrific. Take a look. (Most of these pictures should be clickable to open larger in a separate window.)

Every bit of gold got some kind of texture, even if it was only a straight row of dots along the trim, or a bit of outlining in the gold surrounding each leaf.

 And here it is! After a couple of months (minus a couple weeks for vacation), it's finally complete. I wanted to wait until the client had seen it before I showed all of you. But he's very happy to finally see a scroll for an award he received twenty years ago!

And all that was left to do was sign my name on the back.

Once my client has the payment ready to go, I'll hand it off, and he can get signatures from the people who were "king and queen" when he first received the award, and then it will be official.

Thanks for following along! I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.