Finalized Sketch.

All ready to transfer it to the parchment now.

Isaac

Ginger's Illumination

A picture of the sketch of Ginger's Illumination, my new project.  The red boarder is 5 x 3.75 in.

Isaac

New Project

My lovely wife has asked for a piece of illumination that she might hang up.  After asking some questions I have a few guidelines to go by.

1. Outside or Garden scene
2. Bright and colorful

After doing some looking through my collection at home and some searches online, I've decided to look more at the 15th century book of hours.  Doing a search of the British Library, I ran across Harley 2884. Source Page

Harley 2884, Book of Hours, is from Netherlands, and was done between 1440 to 1460.

It's dimensions are 125 x 95 mm or about 4.92 x 3.75 in.  It looks like at some point in time the pages were trimmed, a common occurrence during rebinding, and with a post-1600 binding, I'm going to guess it's what happened. This guess comes from reading such books like "Introduction to Manuscript Studies" by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham.  So taking the trimming into account and the fact the piece will be framed, I'll be making the painted area a little larger and leaving space around on the edges for matting.

While none of the images are exactly what I wanted, I can take bits of each and add in some other details to achieve my idea.

The over all boarder, and start of the miniature will come from f 113 v Seen here
For the figure in the miniature, I'll use the Mary in f 78 v Seen here I'll be removing Baby Jesus and replacing him with a book.  I also like the image of the castle and hills in the background.

Stage 3

Example of Stage 3: Red Outlines.  

Folio 103 v (close up of the upper left corner of the page)

One of the red inks I have is rather brown in appearance.  It's similar to the color found in examples, just darker. I found when using it there's issues with the ink and the paint.  At times the paint made the ink bleed and at other points I was fighting to leave a line.  I really think that putting down the red lines before paint would help and with how some of paint in the example covers the red lines, I do think that red lines could have been done first.

Isaac

Currently holding at Stage 3

Between the weather and extra work caused by the weather, I haven’t worked on my practice page at all.  I still need to review folios 101 to 127 v for Stage 3: Outlining of the heads, arms, bodies, swords, frames, ect using red ink.

Isaac

Construction: Stage 2

After the layout and the calligraphy comes what appears to be the next stage of construction for the Hexateuch, sold blocks of color.  I've gone ahead and painted Beowulf's helm yellow to help make him stand out even more from the other warriors then just his mail shirt will once it's done.

Next I'll add a light flesh tone to the hands and faces since the watercolor paper is white and finish up the spear points and a few other objects like the legs and shoes.  Then I'll be on to Stage 3.

Isaac

A Quick Side Project

Over the weekend I took a break from Old English and my Beowulf project to get a small piece done.  It's a 4" x 6" illuminated page based on the Book of Hours of the Use of Rome.  I've modified the page by removing a God figure that was in the upper left corner, increasing the size of the figures, and modifying the leaves around the outside.  Over all about a long days worth of work done of the weekend.

Isaac

Calligraphy Hand of the Old English Hexateuch

The calligraphy in the Old English Hexateuch matches closely with the calligraphy done in other Anglo-Saxon sources like Beowulf, the typical Insular minuscule influenced by caroline minuscule. I'm currently building a chart that compares the letter forms. I've used a modern font, the Beowulf font from the front pack from the University of Virginia, and images of each letter taken from the digital facsimile of the Hexateuch.

The image above uses the fonts from the University of Virginia and can be found here 


Features:
- round shape of d
- f that extends below the baseline instead of sitting on top of it
- insular g, with more of a base before it descends
- dotless i
- r that extends below the baseline
- three shapes for s, insular long s and the high s are more common
- t that does not extend above the cross-stroke
- ƿ ("wynn") usually has been translated as w in modern works.
- y is dotted, and the more angular one is used

Some letters that we know now, I just haven't been able to find.  But, as Professor Peter Baker points out in the book "Introduction to Old English"; "Old English has no use for q or z.  J and v do not have the status of spearate letters but are occasional variant shapes of i and u (more common in roman numbers than elsewhere).  Old English scribes used k rarely"

Isaac

Construction: Stage 1...

The Hexateuch since it was never really finished shows off the various steps of it's construction beautifully. Ruling off page into different sections is the first step.  This page will need a box for illumination some where in the center and two areas of text, one on the top of the illumination the other below it.

The artists of the Hexateuch used a dry point method for doing their layout and general composition. I'll be using a mechanical pencil to do mine on the water color paper for my first attempt.

After everything is lined out, the Old English calligraphy is added.  The page below contains lines 210 to 234 of Beowulf. They talk about Beowulf's journey and the Watchman that first meets him at the shore.

Next I'll add the illuminated scene.

The scene contains elements from several different folios in the Hexateuch all drawn together to illustrate what's going on.  The ship is found on folio 14v & 14r, the tower is on folio 22r, the horse rider can be found on folio 47r, the armor to help separate Beowulf is the kings armor from folio 24v, and the group around Beowulf is taken from members of the army found on folio 25v.

Isaac