Should I close the doors?

Well, here we are, after years of intermittent posting and sporadic updates. I still want to keep this blog, but I think I'm moving my scribal updates to my SCA website, Matildis.art, and possibly keeping this one for other things.

What other things? I've stopped doing henna, I'm no longer a freelance editor... so much has happened in the past couple of years, which I haven't posted about. And I have Facebook and Instagram for most of my updates on my personal life. And yet I'm busier than I've ever been, with art, writing (amateur level, nothing published yet), work, parenting, music... my life and my heart are full.

Should I retire "littlefiddlybits"? I don't want to delete it, I have way too much stuff here going back too far to want to erase. Should I dual-update both here and on Matildis.art? I can't decide.

I'd poll my audience but I think only about three people follow this blog, anyway. It's more of an archive for myself than for anyone else.

Decisions, decisions. In the meantime, here is a picture of me with blue hair for my 50th birthday.

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.

Wedding gargoyles

So I was working on the piece shown in my previous post, and sending photos to the client so she could see my progress, when the lady's fiancee reached out to me with a request. She wanted to surprise my client with their combined heraldic arms in a "full achievement", which is to say the shield, supporters on either side holding up the shield, a crest on top, and a mount and motto underneath. She had a number of requests, all of which were meaningful to them as a couple, and asked if they're was any way I could pull it off. 

So I did.

First up was a mockup where I sketched everything in pencil, repeatedly, and then once I was satisfied,  outlined it all in sharpie. The circles will be flowers in the final piece, including the one where a helmet would go on the crest. 

Tracing the final design into my ground. I can't remember now whether I used vellum or perg, but I'm pretty sure it was vellum. 

Let the painting begin! What you're seeing is called "impaled arms", where you either split the two devices right down the middle and then stitch them together, as I did here, or you squish the two devices to take up half the space, but still show everything on each device. So you'd have a whole dragon and scroll instead of halves. 

I had a terrible time getting this flower to come out right, and I'm still not really happy with it even though the client loved it. This is just an in progress photo, though, so more will be added to it as we go.

I wanted to include this pic mainly to show the mixing palette in the corner of the photo. Color theory is kinda fascinating, and I'm really pleased with the gray I ended up with. I took two warm colors, an orangey red and another orangey yellow, but then a cool blue, and mixed them until I got a deep black. Adding white gave me a soft off slate blue-gray.

Side note: understanding color theory gives you so much more control over your palette! I don't usually like to mix colors from scratch, but i think I'll be doing it more often from here on out, because this worked so well. 

All the base colors laid in. Now it's time to shade and highlight the gargoyles. 

I was really, really pleased with how these gargoyles came out. I used a thin wash of a color I'd put together for the flower in the crest and applied that to the wing membranes, and it worked beautifully. I was so excited. 

Another side note: after my work on the heraldry was done, I switched to a size 9 brush. This is gargantuan compared to what scribes usually use, typically in the 0 to 000 range. But it gave me much smoother strokes and allowed me to work more quickly. 

I got bored and thought that the arms could use a little detail work themselves. This is known as diapering and was a traditional way to fill in large areas of color. 

Finally, it was time to outline everything and put the motto in place at the bottom:

The words are from their wedding vows, and come from traditional ancient Roman weddings.

All in all, I was happy with everything except the large flower at the top... but I couldn't figure out a way to make it look good without adding more and more to it until it turned to mud. I was better off stopping where I did rather than ruining it completely. 

The client and her wife loved it, regardless, and the looks on their faces were a joy to see. Plus we had ice cream together! So really, a good day all around.  

Various and sundry

In case anyone's been curious, I have been busy with scribal stuff, but my recipient wants to be surprised, so I've been resisting the urge to post progress pictures of my work. It's another Black Hours piece and it's coming together nicely, though. I think I'll share one pic to give you an idea:

That's from almost a month ago. I had never made a letter out of flowers and foliage before, so it was an interesting challenge. 

The piece shouldn't really have taken so long to finish, but I ran into a problem when I made a mistake trying to shade a figure in the border. She's supposed to be a reasonable looking mermaid, and instead she came out looking like she had a hairy chest because I messed up with the brush strokes... I got advice for how to fix her, but I procrastinated a couple of weeks before climbing back into the metaphorical saddle and actually fixing her. 

Fortunately she looks much better now. I seem to have deleted my "before" picture, or I'd show you that.

So. I've been doing some calligraphy, and I have two more pieces in my queue once this one is done, but I can't show you anything quite yet. 

In other news, I've resurrected an office aquarium that I used to have on my desk at my last job... fourteen years ago... and set it up on my desk at my new job! I'm still waiting for it to settle and the plants I bought to root into the soil before I add any fish, but there are a few snails in there already. Right now it looks like this: 

Not too fancy, but hopefully pretty. I already find myself just watching how the plants move in the water flow, even without any fish, even I'm between tasks at work. 

Hope you all are well. Life here is pretty good. Cheers! 

Some fun initials

Hello all,
I'm working on another calligraphy project, but I'm not sure how many photos I'm allowed to share of it. I couldn't resist a little, though, so here we are.

Back in 2015, I participated in a collaborative project called "Calf to Codex", along with about 75 other poets, flax growers, parchment makers, chicken farmers, a silkworm farmer, calligraphers, pigment grinders, illuminators, bookbinders, and leather workers; we took about five years from start to finish altogether, and successfully crafted a beautiful book of stories and poems from our Society's history.

This year we're beginning Codex 2, which will actually comprise two slim volumes. Unlike the first codex, these are being written on handmade paper from Twinrocker Paper in Brookston, Indiana. The style of the first codex was modeled after the early 1400s, while this one is mid-1500s Italy.
Since the book isn't finished, I'm not sure what I'm allowed to share yet. But I figured it wouldn't be a breach of privacy to show you the whitevine initials from a few of the pages.


You'd think I'd be sick of gilding after the previous project, but I still enjoy it... especially in the smaller doses that today's gilding presented. It's just so much fun to go from this:



... to this!



Following that, as always, comes the paint. Unlike a lot of other illumination styles, whitevine is actually more complicated to draw than it is to paint. Once you've got the vines figured out, all you have to do is color in the areas around them to help them stand out.



Outline in blue, fill in with red and green...





And you're almost done. Once these are dry, I'll probably go back and soften the larger areas with little white dots arranged in triangles. Then there's an optional step where you shade the vines to give them a little more depth, which I'm thinking about skipping... but knowing me I'll probably do it anyway.

I did four initials today, and have three more to go. I'd have liked to do them all today, but being on loose book pages means I have to let these letters dry, so that I can flip the paper over and work on the other side. Here are pages 1, 3, 6, and 8, all together:




The text exemplar is a writing manual originally published in 1522, which is currently available as a PDF. It's a new script for me and has been fun to learn; the biggest challenge has been getting used to writing the letters on a slant, instead of straight up and down like I'm used to with every other alphabet I write. Love those flourishes, though!

As always, I welcome your questions and comments. Cheers!

The "empty days"

People joke about the "empty days" between Christmas and New Years, where no one really knows what day it is or what they're supposed to be doing. Do we go to work? Are we supposed to be traveling somewhere? Why do we even exist? Who knows?

I've been taking advantage of the "empty days" to geek out and do little things here and there. Today, I found a book on marionette-making that I think was included in the back of an old children's copy of Pinocchio that I've had since I was 6 (and haven't been able to find recently *but I know it's around here somewhere*); I've been fascinated by marionettes since I was a kid and always wanted to make one, but never quite have done it. Maybe having this book on hand will kick start a project or something.

In the past few days, I've also bought replacement parts for my drafting compass, which they apparently don't make anymore, finally figured out and wrote Chapter 13 for my novel, and made homemade hot chocolate from a recipe on the side of the Penzeys Cocoa Powder bottle. Yum.

Combine 4 c. milk, 3 TB sugar, 2 TB Natural Cocoa, and a dash of Cinnamon and Vanilla. Heat in a heavy saucepan, top with mini marshmallows.

I skipped the marshmallows. This made about three coffee mugs full of tasty chocolate goodness, but the coffee mugs were all different sizes, so don't take my word on how many it actually serves. There are three people in our house, so for us three mugs was perfect.

Oh, and I've also gone clothes shopping with my Christmas gift card, because I need to update my wardrobe for the job search I'm planning on in January. I hate clothes shopping usually, but I had my daughter to help me out, and it was actually fun for possibly the first time in my life.

So, how have you been? What have your "empty days" looked like?

Hope you have a great New Year, and a great winter holiday of your choosing.

Chapter 9

Slow but steady may not win the race, but it will at least finish it.

The novel I'm working on, tentatively titled The Pilgrimage (and more affectionately known as the NIP for Novel-In-Progress) is up to Chapter 9 now, and I'm pretty happy with how it's coming together. Special appreciation has to go to my group of readers and cheerleaders for offering me constant feedback and encouragement. Thank you!

For those of you who follow me on Tumblr, with the fiasco they're enacting over there, I've gone ahead and made a Pillowfort account. I only have two posts there at the moment, but I'm hoping to update that more frequently, once PF is able to better manage the sudden flood of new traffic that they're receiving.

If anyone feels so moved, please feel free to "buy me a coffee" by visiting the link! The tips are a nice nonverbal way to show your support, if you'd rather not leave comments or chat with me. But of course, there's never any obligation. It's a tip jar, not a shakedown!

In other news, the Lafayette Chamber Singers will be performing our holiday concert today, and I'm pretty excited. A lot of challenging pieces and a lot of effort went into putting this concert together, and I think it's going to sound really cool.

Hope you're all having a good weekend!

Chapter 8 and other nonsense

Well, it's been a bit since I've posted here, hasn't it? That's probably because all my activity lately has been in fandom, and I generally put forth a little bit of effort to keep my fandom life and my "real" life separate. I've been busy writing a novel-length work that I just finished and which has proven pretty popular, so yay for that! But it's not "original" work, so for some people, it doesn't count.

Whatever. They're entitled to their opinions, but since they don't read my stuff anyway, I don't have to worry about those opinions. Win-win for all involved.

Anyway, now that my 100,000 words of fanfic are complete (I did say it was novel-length), I can finally come back and devote energy to the original novel that I've been working on! If you're one of the two people who follow this blog, you'll know that I posted a draft of Chapter 7 to my reading crew back in September. Here it is December, and I'm finally done with Chapter 8. Yes, I know this is slow; that's what happens when you're writing a different novel at the same time.

But yeah. My reading crew. If you're a writer, I highly recommend you get yourself one. If you write fanfic and are trying to switch over to writing original stuff, I highly recommend you get yourself one. In the dim distant days of the Long Ago Time, authors wrote in a vacuum; no one saw their work till the first draft went to the editor, and no one saw the finished piece till it was published.

I can't operate like that.

Fanfic has gotten me into the habit of posting what would have been called "serials", back in the day, and there's nothing wrong with that; we've been doing it in the West since the invention of movable type in the 17th century. I mean, all of The Three Musketeers was originally posted serially, continuity errors and all (did you know Alexandre Dumas made D'Artagnan a Musketeer twice in that story? Well, now you do).

Modern day serials are great, in that you post a chapter online, and then you get feedback and encouragement to write the next chapter, and then you get more feedback, and so on. Now, I do know people for whom that's not the case -- I've been very blessed to have entered the right fandoms at the right time to build a following -- but for the most part, that's how fanfic works. You post serially, and get feedback between chapters. (In the interests of accuracy, yes, there are people who wait and then post an entire work all at once; I'm not one of them, though, and I don't know how they survive that long without hearing from their audience.)

For me, that cycle of feedback has gotten a little addictive. I need to hear back from someone that my work doesn't suck, that they like where I'm taking the story, that they want to know what happens next. I'm pretty sure I can't publish my novel serially and expect to make any money off of it, but while I'm writing it, I can put together a reading crew who will look my drafts over, offer feedback, and wave their cheerleading pompoms at me to keep me going.

Some people call these folks beta readers (from computer programming, beta testers). I've also heard them called alpha readers, with the argument that a beta's job is more about developmental edits and looking for wacky characterization or continuity errors, after a work is finished. (Dumas probably didn't have a beta.) (Actually, no, I know he didn't, but that's another story.) I have one or two beta readers already, but for this stage of development, they don't need to do any editing; they just offer their thoughts and notes about how different characters are behaving, what they think of the plot as it develops, and so on.

If you're a writer, get yourself a crew of people to read and offer encouragement, until the first draft is done. Be sure to thank them in the acknowledgments. After the first draft is done, send it to your betas. Then prepare to revise. After that... after that is a mysterious land I haven't entered yet, that includes hiring an editor to really go over your piece with a fine-toothed comb.

I'm rambling. What was my point? I have a reading crew and they're wonderful, and they're looking at Chapter 8 of my novel right now. Last night, I chatted with some of them to answer a few world building questions about crime and punishment, and ended up with a really excellent plot point to explore in a later chapter. That was fun. World building is my weakness. I can't stay away from it any more than I can stay away from dark chocolate.

For those following me to this blog from Tumblr, "the hellsite" is having a meltdown right now, and I have a feeling that they're going to lose a LOT of users soon. In anticipation of that, and also in acknowledgement that my novel is not fandom-based but is part of my "real life", I'm expecting to post here a bit more often as my novel progresses. I really, sincerely hope people will be interested in reading about those adventures, and that you'll leave a comment or two on my posts so I know I'm not just shouting into the void.

Take care, everyone, and talk to you soon.

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.