Penwork and leaves

Yesterday I did the first green leaves and serious penwork, and I'm quite content with the first try. I did realize when I started drawing the black lines around the green leaves that they are shaped up side down, with the pointed bit at the end of the leave instead of the start, so that will take a bit of practice. The line of penned flowers on the left side of the right hand page turned out rather well I think.

I used the terra verde paint, and it worked better than expected, probably because these are just small shapes, and maybe also because the paint is fairly fresh (made last week).

Hopefully I will be able to finish the penwork next week, and then we'll have reached a milestone, the first page that is completely finished! Wow.

Sampler

I've been doing quite a lot of writing in the book lately, but the scriptorium last week also put me up to looking through my folder of half finished illumination projects and lots of examples of 15th and 16th century Dutch illumination.

We're getting to a stage in the book where lots of pages have been written and are ready for the next "layer": adding whitework, leaves and penwork. We decided not to spend weeks practicing before starting on the book; we've got everything from gold paint to three different kinds of gesso in there allready, and lots of people have helped, some more experienced that others, and all of that is part of the character and charm of the project. So yesterday, I started doing some penwork and green leaves on one page (see the next post), and it looks pretty good.

At the same time, I do want to try and decide on one style of letters to use, and practice a little whitework and penwork, so I'm planning on doing a sampler. These are some of the things I want to have in there:

-the final version of gothic bastarde to use
-penned capitals
-painted lombardic capitals with and without penwork
-whitework examples, both bars and a few larger letters
-line fillers

Scriptorium!

Last Sunday we planned another work session, and this time announced it a bit further ahead of time. We worked with 8 people, and got lots done, yay!

Hilde, Gerulf and Jehan worked on illuminations, Laura filled in some decorated capitals and started on an illumination, Elisabeth painted lots of leaves and her daughter worked on whitework. Bertrik provided paint, and I did a little bit of painting and lots of running around. I also looked up examples of whitework, capitals and penwork.

Bertrik took lots of pictures that he put online: http://www.bertrick.nl/photos/Calligrafie_25-03-2012/#