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