My First Designed Scroll

At the recent Scriptorium and Fencing Camp, I attended with a specific goal in mind; I knew I could copy images well enough, and if I practised enough my painting and blending would be passable, but I had a hurdle to cross in the form of designing and layout.

Using a quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson for inspiration, and chose this image as the inspiration for the flower border. I meant to take a picture at every step in the process, to see it all coming together, but my painting hand was faster than my picture hand, so the process isn't quite seamless.

This was also my first time using pergamenata and I quite love it. It takes the gouache so much easier than the paper I had been using. I cut down a sheet into roughly A5 size pieces, so they'd make nice frameable pieces, possibly even as gifts if they were good enough.

I drew out the image lightly in pencil then outlined in black calligraphy ink. The gold was applied as gold paint, and is also the reason all of the pictures are taken at a funny angle; I had to get the gold to show up well.

The flowers and leaves are painted in with gouache, and I'm much more pleased with the colour blending on this than on my last example. I think here the parchment I was using and that I was blending while the colours were still properly wet contributed significantly. 

One of the best parts of this project was when I stopped for lunch and looked back across at my inked design, and had a moment of not even recognising it. The next moment, it looked perfect, simply perfect. I didn't pounce my perg before I wrote my quote, something I'll remember for next time, as well as the need to practise my letters, but overall I'm very pleased with it. And most importantly, design isn't as scary now!

Adventures in Gilding

As you may have surmised from my previous posts, I've been experimenting with goldwork on illumination, and perhaps, not too successful. I've made several attempts in trying to get the technique down, all with varying levels of failure until recently.

Having done my research in reading various online tutorials and referenced a few books, I set out to try gilding on parchment.In typical overambitious fashion, for my attempts I copied out two images - an acanthus leaf copied free hand from the Göttingen Model Book, and a stylised pomegranate traced from Italian Renaissance Textile Designs. 




For the leaves I attempted to use the glair as size, while for the pomegranate I used diluted PVA as size, for comparison and contrast. I mixed each with a bit of red gouache, the idea there being it will make an almost colourless liquid easier to see on the page. The images below can be clicked to enlarge, but even in the smaller images, the cracking of the gold over its base layer is clear.

After consultation with a friendly local laurel, I found that glair is more often used to create pigments for painting than as a size. Right so, scratch that for any further gilding attempts. I had also picked up a commercial modern, but the attempt I tried with that seems to have grown it's own little legs and walked off, so I can't show it here. But trust me, it didn't work either.

On a household day Thora suggested I try just painting up the parchment I was using with gouache, to make sure it wasn't so permeable as to not be usable for my purposes at all. A couple of splashes later, and while the end product is quite matt, it had no troubles adhering either.

One of the vital steps in gilding is reactivating the size by breathing on it, and allowing the moisture in your breath to make the glue sticky again. Lack of humidity not really being an issue in Ireland, a part of my mind starting wondering if I should make sure I could still fog up a mirror by hawing on it, or if I'd suddenly become undead while I wasn't looking.



The gouache test confirmed, I moved on to trying my new garlic size, to see if that would work any better than the previous attempts. Go on guess. I bet you know the answer. Again you can see the crackling in the attempts to lay it out. At this point I was becoming very frustrated. It's one thing to get things not-quite-right as you learn, it's another to be following the instructions from a book and still fail. 

You might notice, as I went on, my practice pieces became smaller. Granted I probably should have started out small until I got the hang of it, but it says something for the state of my confidence. So, one more try I told myself, and this time I checked the method in one of Thora's books, and found something that none of the previous tutorials had mentioned - sealing the paper.

So on my last attempt of the evening I drew out a tiny leaf, painted it meticiously with garlic size and waited for the longest thirty minutes of my life. Time up, I repainted with size and waited for the new longest time of my life; a whole hour. I carefully reactivated, applied leaf in three layers, burnished oh-so-carefully, and voila! A tiny, but perfect little gilded leaf!

This was the overview of my attempts but when I next have the kit out, I'll make sure to take pictoral notes of all my steps, in the hopes that this might help someone else get started. 

Making size - garlic juice

When I made the glair, I was attempt to make a period size; that is, a period glue for attaching gold leaf to parchment. Since that didn't go so well (which is going to be its own post), I decided to try another period size - garlic juice.

Initial set up was to dice up the garlic cloves and grind them in my mortar. I gave up after about 10 minutes of this, when it became clear that the garlic was more intent on escaping the mortar than obediently turning into mush. I think before I try this method again, I need to invest in an rougher mortar so the garlic has something to grip onto.



So I gave up and reached for *coff* ye olde stick blender. In mere dozens of seconds, garlic mush!

My first attemt to extract the juice from this was to try pushing it through a fine metal sieve. And while this did give me the first few drops of juice, very shortly afterwards a fine pulp starting coming through; not so great.

I remixed the fine pulp with the mixture in the sieve and this time tried sqeezing it by hand in a piece of muslin. Squeezing too hard here produced the same problem, but another quick reset, and this time I had liquid gold!

The tiny jar of the right is the product of two whole bulbs of garlic. I didn't press the pulp completely dry, as I intended to pop it into a jar and leave it in the fridge until my next stir fry. I do hope this size works. I shall be trying it out shortly!

Making Glair

I found a few tutorials on making glair for use in illumination online, and while very good they didn't answer one question. So I have to make it for myself.

For those of you that haven't looked up the other tutorials, making glair is a very simple process. First, you need to seperate egg whites from the yolks, being very careful not to allow any yolk fat into the white. Then you beat the egg whites until they're stiff, the same process as making meringues. Or if you don't know how to make meringues, whip the egg whites until they've changed from a liquid to a white froth. When you think it's stiff enough, tilt the bowl gently; if the froth starts to slide, then you need to whip a little bit more.

When my egg whites were whipped, I covered the bowl with a tissue and left it overnight, on the counter out of the fridge. The next day, the glair liquid can be gently poured out of the bowl and into a jar for keeping. I opted to throw a clove into the jar too, to keep the smell at bay as the glair ages.


And the question that I wanted answered? What happens to the fluff after the glair is poured off? I thought it might still have been similar to whipped egg whites, but it turns out it's more like medieval styrofoam. Good to know.

First Steps in Illumination

This week I found myself with an unexpected couple of hour gap in my schedule. I felt it was important to do something with that time, so I pulled out my paints and attempted something I've been putting off: Medieval Illumination.

Drawing is something I used to do a lot when I was much, much younger, but never practiced. So I've tried, but generally put it off because things have never worked out the way I wanted. Even when I'm designing clothing, I tent to skip straight from idea to sewing without doing up a sketch, because that one step trips me up more often than not.



First step was to sketch out my chosen image, a Scitalis or serpent from Medieval bestiaries. The particular image I've chosen is the one which appears in the Aberdeen Bestiary.

I've harrassed my more experienced illuminating friends for a while about this, so I knew which basic materials to use. The inial colours of my scitalis were completed with Reeves gouache colours, a 12 colour set, so lots of blending was involved. The original image I believe had a gold background; a little too advanced for begining with (plus I couldn't find my gold leaf), so I went with a yellow cold colour wash. This was also fabulous for covering up the stray pencil marks that my cheap rubber couldn't erase.


So here's my finished attempt, with the original below for comparison. I'm quite pleased with it. I've an awful lot to learn about blending and painting with gouache paints. I'm very pleased with how the face turned out, less pleased with this attempt on the body. The wings please me too, even if they are simpler than the original. I imagine practice will make my hand steadier, otherwise I'll have a hard time convincing people that my wiggly lines were just an attempt at making an extremely faithful reproduction of the original's not perfectly straight lines.

I've picked up a few supplies now to help me along with this (the difference decent brushes can make!), and I'm looking forward to trying it again instead of letting it intimidate me.