Diary of a scribe: Making an Illuminated Manuscript
Hello everyone!
The idea behind this series will be to document the process that takes me from a blank page, to something as shown in the opening picture of this post. Specifically we will be following the development of my latest commission. An Illuminated Manuscript covering two plays from Fiore Dei Liberi's "Flower of Battle" Manuscript
I would like to stress before getting in to it that I am not saying that this is THE best way or how YOU should be doing this. This is just my current method of working that works best for me. I have learned mostly through trial and error, building on what has worked for me in the past and continuing to develop with each new project. There is a lot to cover in this first post so with that out of the way lets get started.
First steps:
Goals
When starting a new project the obvious first step is to look at the source material. In this case I am reproducing two plays from the Fiore Manuscript:
The above pictures are scans from the Manuscript itself. The goal will be to transfer these images over to the medium we will be using (manuscript vellum in this case) along with the original Middle Italian text.
Proper prior planning prevents.......well you know the rest.
This is the most important step in the whole process. People have said to me that I am essentially doing the whole thing twice and wasting time. But I have found that this saves me time, materials and really helps me get the most out of the project.
If you don't have a light box, get one. They're not essential but since I got this I can't begin to tell you how helpful it has been.
So you need to consider a few things when planning out your design. Most frames will always cover part of your edge. So as a rule I generally come in about 1.5cm on all sides and use this as my new edge. If you have a frame designed you won't need to do this, or you could probably reduce this new edge down to 0.5cm, but 1.5cm works for me.
From here it is a battle of your writing style vs the text. This will always dictate the design of the document. The smaller and neater you can write the more space you will have for your illuminations. My style of writing is the Carolingian minuscule. This style existed between 800-1200AD although it had a comeback in the 14th and 15th century in the form of the Humanist Minuscule so it first with the time period of the source manuscript. In this style I can comfortable work on lines that are only 8mm apart from one another.
So the next step was to sketch out the design, line the paper and start writing:
Top half
A considerable chunk of the top half was given to the main illumination (not yet drawn). As you can see the text fits comfortably within the top section not falling below the illumination. I gave myself two additional lines of space, however they were not needed. At this point I could have adjusted the size of the fencers. However I want to add marginalia to the design and the current scale gives me some nice open spaces.
Bottom half
I did not do this on purpose but this is exactly why you MUST plan out your design. So as you can see on the fist line I have a crossed out word. I did not make a spelling mistake or write the wrong word here. What happened was I was unsure if the word would fit in the space that I had. Seeing as this was just plain paper I decided to give it a shot. Turns out it did not fit so I just crossed it out and moved to the line below. Now I know when it comes to writing on my vellum not to try and make it squeeze in there. Again I gave myself and additional line in case I needed to space things out better.
The border design is taken from several historical examples and mashed together. A thin gold line surrounded by bright colours (as shown in the first opening picture).
Expanding the design: Marginalia.
One of the defining aspects of an illuminated manuscript is the marginalia. My favorite examples are the rabbits. I talked about these in my previous blog, but rabbits are often doing absolute crazy things. Everything from robbing people, fighting angels to engaging in siege warfare against a dog army. When I add marginalia I tend to look for historical examples and copy them in to my work. No surprise here, I decided to go with rabbits and dogs.
The illuminated initial L gives us a perfect platform for our horn blowing rabbit here.
Next to our two fencers here, we have another duel taking place. With sword and buckler in hand engaging dueling to the death. So technically a sneaky two for one deal in sword play.
And finally this rabbit does not approve of this battle so he plans to end it himself. I will leave it up to you to decide who his arrow is for.
Transferring the design
This is where the light box seen previously comes in handy. Vellum is translucent, so all you need to do is pop the vellum over your design and trace it.
Sorry for the poor picture
Working with Vellum
Vellum is not paper. I know that sounds obvious but it really isn't paper. This is genuine calfskin manuscript grade vellum. You can only obtain it from one place in the whole of the United Kingdom, that means it is extremely expensive. Once you get up close and personal with Vellum you can see that it almost has no relation to modern day paper. It is a little stiff like card but also flexible, it is very smooth on one side but grainy on the other. This is what they call the skin and hair side of the Vellum. Yes you read that right, if you look really closely you can sometimes see hair follicles in the skin. Depending on the peace you can also have a pattern where the veins were. This is part of what gives vellum that unique look as every piece is different from one another. Like a snowflake no two sheets are the same.
Yes those are where the veins were
Drawing on vellum is a little difficult, it does not react to pencil all that well. But it works enough that you can put a faint outline of what you're wanting to do. It is just extremely difficult to see as vellum reacts to light differently than paper. Writing on it is also different than writing on paper. On paper the ink flows nicely from my quill, allowing me to write at a reasonable pace. However using Vellum it almost feels as if I am scraping the ink on to the page. Also when you look at it from the right angle it almost has a 3D quality as if the writing is almost sitting slightly off the surface.
It is a strange experience using vellum, and all I can say is that if you can get your hands on some then do it as you will not regret using this material. It also feels strange knowing that we have manuscript that are made out of this exact material going back a thousand years. So yes I can't help bit wonder if this will also last that long, and who will be looking at it then?
"But what if you make a mistake?!" I can almost hear you asking that (I asked it myself enough). Well here is probably one of the best things about vellum. If you make a mistake no problem at all. Just wait for it to dry, grab yourself a very sharp knife and start to gently scrape away the ink. Lightly sand or smooth our the area you were working on and then start to write again. Vellum is extremely forgiving and due to its expense we know in the past that they used to scrape off the writing on old pieces to use the vellum again.
However playing it safe I wrote the document out in two stages. We are finally at the current state of the document:
Next we will be adding the glue for the gold leaf and gilding the manuscript. This phase is my favorite part of the entire process.
See you next time!
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