Little Fiddly Bits

Should I close the doors?

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:18:00 +0000

Well, here we are, after years of intermittent posting and sporadic updates. I still want to keep this blog, but I think I'm moving my scribal updates to my SCA website, Matildis.art, and possibly keeping this one for other things.

What other things? I've stopped doing henna, I'm no longer a freelance editor... so much has happened in the past couple of years, which I haven't posted about. And I have Facebook and Instagram for most of my updates on my personal life. And yet I'm busier than I've ever been, with art, writing (amateur level, nothing published yet), work, parenting, music... my life and my heart are full.

Should I retire "littlefiddlybits"? I don't want to delete it, I have way too much stuff here going back too far to want to erase. Should I dual-update both here and on Matildis.art? I can't decide.

I'd poll my audience but I think only about three people follow this blog, anyway. It's more of an archive for myself than for anyone else.

Decisions, decisions. In the meantime, here is a picture of me with blue hair for my 50th birthday.

Black Hours, Mary Oliver, October 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 21:30:00 +0000

The Black Hours pieces I've done are so striking, that it seems like as soon as I complete and show off one, I get another potential client asking if I'd be willing to do another. That was absolutely the case following September's Walt Whitman quote, "Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you."

In this case, the client wanted a quote from Mary Oliver's poem, "It Was Early", wherein the narrator is taking a nature walk just at sunrise and marveling at the beauty they see. I'm not familiar with Mary Oliver's work in general, which is just a shame, because I've had two clients come to me with quotes from her work and they both really spoke to me. In this case, after the year I and my family have had, "Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed" was just an amazing sentiment.

Text mockup, checking letter forms and filling the border with various sketch ideas for the roundels. There might be some leftover images there from the previous commission, as well.

After that, it was time for margins, the text block, and of course all the vines. I believe I did still copy a page from the manuscript facsimile for this one, just to make sure I got the density right. I have a tendency, when I'm not working from a source, to be too timid and end up with very open vines and a lot to empty space that I then have to fill in.

Text in silver, with the word "blessed" in gold. I'm using Finetec/Coliro metallic paints for this, just thinned and loaded into the pen with a paintbrush rather than dipping into the paint cake. Colors are Sterling Silver and Arabian Gold.

Time to start those large elements in the border. If you follow this blog at all, you'll know by now that I work largest to smallest, and usually these large acanthus leaves are in silver and gold.

I'm just going to take a moment to tell you how VERY proud I am of this pinecone. I found reference pictures and drew two or three to practice before drawing this one, and then painting over it in silver. It turned out even better than I had hoped. The shadow of my phone is deliberate, to ease the glare from the metallic paint, so you can see the details a little better.

Silver and gold all set! This was a fairly balanced piece, but I remember being surprised by how much silver and gold was in that narrow left border compared to the rest of it.

The poem has several references to elements of nature, including a weasel hunting mice, an owl, and of course trees. Here's the weasel with base coats laid in; I am very grateful to the mighty Google for providing reference images that worked. Without a sense of scale, many people looked at this critter and thought he was an otter, which is fair considering that weasels and otters are related. But no, not an otter.

Not sure how well the details show up here, but I've added whiskers and claws, and a bit of shading and texture to the coat.

A barn owl I was also really, really proud of, and the first roundel, with pines on a hill.

Here's that same roundel with some better highlight added to the trees; they were a little flat before.

For my second roundel, I wanted a weeping willow tree, and I thought I had it right, but then I realized, no, this is a pretty sad looking tree. For one thing, it doesn't have any leaves on it.

There we go, much better. But still kinda missing something...

Oh right. Highlights! A little bit of rose on the tree and in the water to indicate a sunrise, and more definition for the cattails, and it looked waaaaay better.

After that, it was time to add field mice! These are such adorable little critters that they are a favorite of photographers, which meant lots of reference shots for me to work from. Very helpful. Thank you, photographers of the internet.

I mean, just look at those little tails.

So here's that stage of the coloring complete; the only area that I didn't give you a detail photo for were the pine needles that I added beneath the pinecone above. Now it's time to color in the flowers, with red, blue, and white. All these flowers are part of the original source material from the 1480s.

After that, there were green things to add as well, including the pears on the top, to the left of the pinecone; strawberry tops; and leaves and such throughout the piece. I love how with each stage, the border comes together more and more. It's also fun to show pictures to people and have them remark on what they think is the finished piece, when there are more stages yet to add.

The next stage is to add the silver and gold highlights to the leaves, fruit, roundels, and critters.

The shaping and texture of the gold on the weasel came out really well. The mice also look lovely, but the owl is the one that really blew my mind.

The added texture in the wing feathers and the tail just really made the owl leap into focus for me. I was very pleased with how that came out!

And here's the finished border; all that's left is to outline the roundels and border in silver, and erase my pencil marks inside the text block. I never worry about erasing the pencil marks anywhere else, because for the most part, they get buried under all the busy-ness and color.

Signed, sealed, and delivered in October of 2020, a little before Halloween. My client was thrilled, and so was I.

I got a little tired of doing Black Hours pieces back to back, though, so my next one was something completely different! I dropped back in time a couple hundred years and got to practice human figures with wonky posture, which is always entertaining.

Until next time!

Calf to Codex

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 01:24:00 +0000

I don't think I ever posted about this back when it happened, so I figured now would be a good time.

In about 2010 (I think), Master Johannes von Narrenstein had a brilliant idea. We in the SCA, he posited, have all the skills needed to produce a book from start to finish. We have parchment makers and bookbinders, we have calligraphers and painters, we have people who make paints from scratch out of authentic pigments. Why not make a book?

The project took five years, and about seventy-five people, most of whom were poets and composers who provided the content for the book. But they did it, and Codex Mediterraneae is a thing that exists, and I and my child were part of it.

I don't have pictures of all the pages; I was given only the first "gathering" or "quire" of eight pages, and only had to write on about half of them. The very first poem was written about the Middle Kingdom's first king, and set to music in a style that honored the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. I took an online course in medieval music notation so that I could transcribe the music to medieval notation and make it "look right" for our book.

The lyrics and notation for the song.

Everything about this book was done as authentically as possible. The pages were parchment made from donated deer hides. The writing was done with black and red ink made from medieval recipes, and a goose quill pen. I was not allowed a pencil to sketch things, I was given a stick of lead!

Here are as many photos as I could find of the project, with as little rambling commentary as possible.

Testing the inks and alphabet

A mockup of the text and notation of the first page.

Penciled guidelines for the pages

A marble slab to mull pigment, a bottle of gum arabic solution, a glass rod to stir them together, and a shell to put the paint in. I ended up not mulling the red at all.

Painting the guidelines onto the vellum, without a ruler; if you look closely, you can see where I scraped off the leftmost line because I got the spacing incorrect on it.

One page fully lined.

"On the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, a song of history based upon the Agincourt Carol. Words by Nicolaa de Bracton; tune by Ursula Mortimer."

Lining the page for musical notation is not at all the same as lining it for text!

The page is paperclipped to my guidelines on all sides.

My practice sheet, with the modern notation above and medieval neumes on the bottom.

Copying the musical notes onto the page so that they line up correctly with the words.

Page two of the music. I only included notation for verse one and the refrain; the rest of the lyrics are written as poetry.

The remaining verses.

My favorite part of my assignment: The book curse!

"If anyone take away this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen." This is a translation of an actual book curse from the Middle Ages.

Preparation to mull pigments for paint.

Assistance with mulling azurite into a fine enough powder to make paint. This is my child, age 10 at the time.

Azurite behaves oddly in that it gets lighter the longer you mull it. The pale yellow-blue to the left is not what we wanted, but the darker blue is almost too gritty to paint with. It definitely added texture to the page, let's put it that way.

An example page from the 1400s of the illumination style we were to use. We were given several options to play with, but this was the style I preferred.

Sketching a beast modeled after one found on a tapestry dated to the early 1400s.

Preparing the gold leaf; as with the rest of the book, we were not to use modern adhesives. Behind the leaf, you can see a tiny jar of garlic juice.

Gilding upside down, as one does.

Burnishing the gold onto the page so that it will stay.

Sweeping away the excess to reveal the letter underneath.

Painting with garlic juice, in the areas where the gold is intended to stick.

A page of gilded initials.

A fully gilded page, ready to paint.

The gold is in place on this page but the excess has not yet been brushed away.

I always enjoy that before-and-after moment of gilding.

Base colors on the beast; the green is still wet here.

Vine work, leaves, and flowers are added to the golden bar.

The page fully illuminated.

Penwork around the initials on the music page; you can see where the gritty azurite failed to provide fine lines around the red "I".

Another page decorated and ready to go.

Not shown is my child assisting with the painting; the scales were laid out in white and then covered in blue, to give them good contrast with the green. My child painted the blue entirely without help.

Finally the beast was highlighted in shell gold, and delicate vines added around it. In closeup, it may be possible to see the name "Arrantxa" (my SCA name at the time) written inside part of the vine underneath the beast. It actually reads "Arrantxa et Celeste me fecit." Arrantxa and Celeste made me. Celeste was my child's SCA name at the time.

The book itself has traveled to many SCA events to be read and sung from, and has been featured in at least one magazine article. You can read it here.

The Calf to Codex Project remains to this day one of the highlights of my scribal career, and I'm proud to have been even a small part of it.

Black hours commission, September 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 20:43:00 +0000

The "Black Hours" refers to manuscripts created during a narrow time period, around 1470-1480 if I remember right, that were the product of a short-lived fad to show off both how pious you were and also how filthy rich. The pages were black vellum, which is where they get their name, and the "ink" used to write on them was silver and gold. There are only seven surviving examples of Black Hours manuscripts (only really three online that I could find), because the different options for turning the pages black would either cause the page to eventually disintegrate, or would cause the paint to flake off. All the surviving Black Hours pages are damaged to some degree or another; one book, the Sforza Black Hours, was so fragile that in order to preserve it at all, conservators had to completely dismantle the book and seal each page between sheets of glass.

But boy are they still pretty to look at. Here's a link to a seller of facsimile manuscripts, with some great zoomable images for study. The modern eye finds them just as striking now as they no doubt were six hundred years ago, and they make for a popular topic when I teach the class on the painting technique, as well as very popular commission requests.

Here's one I completed in September. The client wanted a quote from Walt Whitman: "Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you."

As always, the calligraphy goes first, followed by sketching the layout. I followed the exemplar pretty closely; it's a very "busy" style in the border and I tend to shy away and leave things too open if left to my own devices.

I've had several people ask if I'm using a special pencil to sketch my design, but as it turns out, plain old graphite is shiny enough that it shows up just fine on black paper! That's a regular, standard-issue, office supply mechanical pencil there, the kind you can buy in a pack of ten. I'm not pressing hard, I'm not using a special lead, I'm just sketching and it shows up just fine.

Here are a couple of closeup shots for the details that the client wanted me to include. She really likes nature, nymphs, and fairies, and also thought that a sunburst would be a perfect thing to include since the quote references sunshine.

There's a fairy in there, if you can pick it out... its wings are meant to be butterfly wings, but the proportions aren't quite right. I don't end up fixing that until later, in the painting stage.

Can you see the bird and its chicks? I promise it is easier to make out once it's colored in.

Finally it was time to start the coloring; I always work largest to smallest, and that usually means starting with the silver and gold acanthus leaves.

The nymphs suddenly become a lot easier to spot!

After silver comes gold:

I am very, very pleased with how that sunburst came out. Shading with a metallic color is hard, because you can't add white or anything else to lighten its intensity. You have to thin it down with water instead, and then let the paint build in opacity as you layer it, while trying not to over-wet the paper or have blobby, imprecise paint marks. It's more of a watercolor technique, I think, than a gouache technique (gouaches are meant to be opaque, not translucent).

After that, it was time for the regular colors:

One reason I enjoy the scribal arts so much is because every piece so far has been a learning experience. I haven't gotten bored with repetition very often at all in the past twenty years. That little bunny rabbit there? Totally new techniques for me with mixing paint (I am lazy, and prefer to just use straight colors without having to blend anything) and shading.

Of course, into every piece a little "eh" must fall, so here is the fairy that didn't turn out quite right:

The wings aren't proportioned quite right and the decoration is.... not that great. I manage to fix the wing proportions a little farther along, but for now let's distract ourselves with this lovely bird in its nest, instead.

A neat feature of this particular Black Hours book was that they included mini-scenes in the margins of the page, in little roundels at the side and bottom. The bottom one, as you saw, includes that sunburst. Here is the side:

You know how when you're a kid you tend to draw the same horse over and over, or the same cat, or whatever? I tend to draw the same tree almost all the time, so this one wasn't too difficult. I especially like how the black background is visible through the leaves.

Also, I told you I'd finally do something about that fairy's wing proportions...

The colors are still... not that great, in my opinion, but at least the wings no longer look like they were put on upside down.

So here we are so far:

The final step for each of these was to add delicate silver and gold highlights to them, to help tie them to the rest of the border. Otherwise, the duller "plain" colors might look like holes in the overall shiny effect.

I especially like how the silver brings out the contrast on the bird's darker blue and purple tones, which I'd feared might get lost against the black background.

Now that I've gotten the difficult stuff out of the way, it's time to tackle the flowers, fruit, and leaves throughout the border. This is just a matter of pulling out some single colors and not having to blend anything, and it goes surprisingly quickly.

Blue and white were first; I could have started with any color, really, and have in the past, but this time I was in the mood for blue and white:

Then it was time for red and green:

So the overall effect looks like this. The border is really starting to come together!

And yet, still not finished. Now that the base colors have been added, they will also get the silver and gold highlight treatment. Then after that, we lay in all the stems and tendrils in gold and silver, then fill in any previously unnoticed gaps or open spaces with squiggles and starbursts (or squashed spiders, depending what you want to call them). Click the image below, and if you're on a desktop or laptop, it should open in a separate window, where you can click again to zoom in on it.

Here are a few closeups where you can see what I'm talking about with the background fills, the squiggles and starbursts. There's also a hidden honeybee, if you look closely.

The rabbit's gold highlights turned out great, and there's another honeybee in this picture. The piece has a total of four hidden bees, just for fun.

And the unveiling, the finished piece with all my pencil marks erased. The only thing I did after this was add my signature on the bottom, and mail it to the client, who tells me she absolutely loves it.

I am thrilled to report that my commissions queue is actually growing! After this piece, which was completed in September, I did another Black Hours, which I'll post about in another week or so, that was done in October. For a change of pace, I'm currently working on a piece modeled after manuscripts from the 1100s, so, much earlier and visually different from this style, and then after that I'll be replacing someone's old diploma that got wet and went moldy.

Every piece is a new learning experience.

Changes a-comin'

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 20:19:00 +0000

Hello all,

I wanted to let you all know that I have set up a small shop and commissions page over on Ko-fi.com - you may have noticed the button off to the right of my posts (only visible in web view, not mobile view). Ko-fi was originally designed to serve as a sort of "tip jar" for creators and their supporters, who might wish to show appreciation from time to time even if they couldn't afford a large donation or purchase. Ko-fi has since expanded their services to allow me to sell work through their site. With my free membership, they take a small commission from every purchase, but it's really minor and I don't mind paying it to support them. There are no ads and they don't collect your data in any way, as far as I know.

I also wanted to get feedback from you about the possibility of moving this blog over to Wordpress. I've never used Wordpress before, but I've heard good things; most importantly, I've heard that it's really easy to subscribe to a Wordpress blog and be notified when a new post comes out. It's my hope that I could have a little bit cleaner look to the blog, with a little more ease in finding things in mobile view (on my current blog, post tags are only visible in web view, for example), and also build something of a subscriber base.

Is that something that people might be interested in?

In the meantime, we are well, the new house construction is coming along steadily, and I've been hired but not yet started at a new job. I'm writing lots and making art that makes me happy, so all in all, life is pretty good.

I hope you are well, too. Be safe, and be kind.

A commission for a friend

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 19:05:00 +0000

I was busy enough teaching online classes this summer that I forgot to update my blog. I was also posting to other sites and social media locations, so unfortunately I treated this space as a lower priority. Let's fix that.

Earlier in the year I was approached by a lady who wanted to commission me to make four matching cards for herself and three lifelong friends of hers. The cards would have their names, a bird associated with each name, and the word "Love" in the middle.

Experiments with the treatment of "love"

After that it was time to cut my cards to size and lay them out. Centering text is always a challenge for me, but I got it right eventually. Thank goodness for mockups.

The cards, all laid out

Then it was time to actually write the words: probably the easiest calligraphy assignment I've ever had, this commission was going to be ALL about the illumination.

After that, it was time to pencil in all the illustration; the challenge here was that once I had one card done, I couldn't simply copy it for the others. If you look closely, you'll note that the names on the cards above "rotate", which means that the birds associated with each name also rotate and are in a different corner on each card.

What I ended up doing was laying out one card completely, then since the ground I used here was translucent, I either traced the birds directly, or flipped the card over and traced the reverse side to get the "backwards" version of the bird. The picture below shows all the cards laid out finally, as well as my cluttered workspace and a bit of the photocopied manuscript page I used for inspiration.

I had just gotten some new gilding adhesives -- a gesso for raised gilding, as well as a flat size -- and I couldn't wait to try them out. You saw the results in my previous post, but those leaves and dots were much larger than what I ended up needing for this commission.

Because I was feeling impatient, there were places where the gesso didn't go down as smoothly as it could have on this first card, but I was able to correct that for the second one. The only trouble I really found was that raised gilding is a slow process no matter what you do, and the repetition of so much gilding on four cards really got to me.

Problems with gilding are not an issue if you're not in a hurry, but they're still annoying. And this was with a really good gesso that ordinarily worked very well.

The first card, halfway through gilding

Second card, gilding almost complete

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy gilding, but this was a LOT of gold. And a lot of repetition.

So I only did two cards with the gesso, and the latter two cards were done with flat size. MUCH faster, and a cure for the procrastination that was plaguing me throughout this project.

If you look closely you can see the light shining on the flat size, here on the third card

Where the gesso took anywhere between a few hours and overnight to cure and be ready to work with, the flat size was ready in about ten minutes. It also didn't require the extra step of breathing to "activate" the gesso so that it would be tacky enough to hold the gold. Not to sound like an advertisement or anything, but "Jerry Tresser's Pink Stuff" is a really great material to work with. The gold stayed put and didn't need a second application to cover any bare spots.

A closeup of the hawk in one corner of the third card

You know how I love my before and after pictures of gilding...

After the mess is cleared away and it's all sharp and crisp

The flat gilding is always a different look from the raised, but it's so much easier to work with when you don't want to take forever.

Anyway, after I finally finished gilding all four cards, it was time to start painting! These pieces were a little weird in that they are very light on calligraphy and actual painting, and very very heavy on gilding and then ink/outlining. You'll see in a minute, here...

Really not a lot at all, but just enough color to give accent to the piece.

A closeup of one of my owls, just to give an idea of the fine brush strokes needed

A closeup of my first dove, which I was quite proud of

Learning experience time: I'm not someone who ordinarily does a lot of shading or paint-mixing when I do illuminations. I prefer to work with a simple, limited palette and not have to blend anything, because I either don't get enough contrast between my high, mid, and low tones, OR I don't mix enough of a particular color and have to keep remixing it, and never getting the color quite right. It's a personal hurdle in my development that I just... need to work on, whether I like it or not, if I want to move forward as an artist.

So for this piece, I actually did mix and blend and play with colors, and while I still ran out of color here and there, I was actually pretty happy with how the various birds came out, starting with this dove.

After laying in color, there was room for a little bit of whitework on each "LOVE" in the center of the page:

And then it was time to outline. Lots and lots of outlining. I used a brush and paint for this, rather than ink, because the surface was being resistant again, similar to un-pounced vellum. I'm a bit cranky about this. I know a lot of people who love to work with pergamenata, but I am not one of them. If it's paper, it should behave like paper and not require special preparation to use. If it's animal-skin vellum, I expect that to be a necessary step. I do not expect that to be the case for something that is essentially a fancy paper. Yes, I know, this is me being contrary. Yes, I know I need to get over it. But man, having the painting take three times as long as it should because I had to keep going over each line two or three or MORE times, to get the line to show up smoothly and not ragged, was really, really irritating.

Even with the difficulties, look at what an immense difference the outlining and "inking" makes compared to the relative openness of the left half of the card. The density of the vine work really makes itself known and the border finally distinguishes itself from the open space in the middle with the text.

The first finished card

This is one of the raised-gilding pages, so you can see the glimmer of the three-dimensional gold in the bottom left corner, where my hand has created a little bit of shadow on the page.

After that, it's just... more of the same: procrastinate, paint, procrastinate more, outline, admire the finished result, move on to the next card...

Closeup of one of the hawks

Closeup of a cardinal

Here we are with three of the cards done...

Third card

Closeup of another owl, and a look at the different look the flat gilding has compared to the raised

And finally, at long last, all four cards were finished, taken off the table, and laid out for this pretty picture.

I really need to go to the print shop and get some of these run off to try and fill in my new portfolio. The old one of course was destroyed, but I still have a number of pictures of my older work. I want to get those reprinted sometime so I can have something to show off.

Closeup of one of the cardinals

And that's pretty much it! I took a LOT of pictures of this project, so if anyone wants to see more shots of various hawks, owls, cardinals or doves, or a closer look at the white work on each "LOVE", just let me know. But for now, this post is complete! The project took most of the spring and summer to complete, thanks to my procrastination and a few other factors, but it was completed and sent to the client on September 1 and she tells me she really loved them. She's going to have them framed and delivered as gifts to three of her friends, and keep the fourth for herself.

I've been busier than just this over the summer, I promise, and in the next couple of weeks I hope to post a little more of what I've been up to. In the meantime, take care, one and all, and leave a comment if you liked what you saw here. Cheers!

Gilding experiments

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:58:00 +0000

Re-establishing my scribal kit after the fire is going to take time, but I've been doing it in stages, bit by bit, over the past several weeks. Some of the parts I've replaced have been my gilding supplies. I've always enjoyed gilding, as I know you've read if you follow this blog at all, but most of the materials I've used have been fairly modern. I have had varying degrees of luck using anything period, but I think I may have finally hit the jackpot on a material that's as close to period as I want to get.

This stuff is a recipe for gilding gesso (not the same thing as painter's gesso) made by Jerry Tresser and available either at his website or through John Neal, Bookseller. It is based off the period recipe in Cennini's "Il Libro dell' Arte", but replaces the highly toxic white lead of that recipe with non-toxic titanium white. It goes on nice and thick and dries raised, as it is supposed to. However, in the teardrop above (less so in the leaf below), if you look at the center you can see a bit of a dimple where it shrank somewhat as it dried. Sigh. With a lot of gilding materials, this is a flaw in the material itself, but I will confess that it's also a flaw in my own technique. I tend to "glop first" and put all the gesso down at once, and hope for the best. This is not the best. Still pretty good though! Apart from the dimple, this gesso did dry smooth and not wrinkly like you might recall the miniatum does that I used in my last big raised-gilding project. Gold leaf is thin enough that it will show every flaw and texture in the surface below it, which can be fun when you're flat gilding on paper and the grain shows through, but less so on raised gilding where you're hoping for a mirror-like finish.

Even so, I do like how I'm able to tease the gesso into corners and sharp points, as on the leaf above.

Here's a picture of the teardop and a dot after gilding; the flaw in my technique meant that I didn't wait long enough for the gesso to dry, and had to burnish very gently and carefully. The edges of the gesso were dryer than the center, and would not take the gold as well. Another probable cause of the problem was my refusal to paint a thin layer down first, allow that to dry a bit, then paint the thick layer over it. Again, this is more of a flaw in my technique than with the material.

Even with those flaws, the gold is still smooth and shiny, where it did stick.

So above, here's the same card a day later. I wrote dates next to each of the samples, and made a second attempt at gilding the older ones, labeled 4-28. Taking more time to allow the gesso to dry completely, burnishing a little harder, and taking a little more care gave me good results! There are still dimples, but with this particular gesso I likely would have been able to smooth them out with a scalpel if I had tried it. For the 4-29 samples, however, I painted a thin layer of gesso, let it dry for an hour (it darkens somewhat as it dries and goes matte instead of shiny), then went ahead and painted the thicker layer over the top. This is probably still a little impatient on my part, because the advice I've heard is to allow many thin layers to build up, rather than glop it all on as I prefer... but darn it, the technique this time worked beautifully. No dimples, although for some reason my second dot dried less as a rounded dome and more as a disk with raised edges. I'm still happy with it. The teardrop was great and the leaf made me happy as well.

Now for the magic part of this material:

You can burnish the gesso. Look at the teardrop above, which I burnished, compared to the dot and leaf which I didn't. Just look at how shiny that thing is! Can you guess how amazing that finish is going to look with gold on it? I got very very excited, and had to show the picture to everyone on Facebook, and the card to everyone in the house, here in quarantine lockdown.

Gilding all three new areas turned out to work better than the first attempts, too. I let them all sit overnight to dry, at least twelve hours I think, but less than twenty-four, and had zero problems with the gold not sticking to the edges. Whether that's because it was a rainy day, because I had painted a thin layer down first, or because I was able to press the gold down a little harder, I'm not sure.

I still want to obtain a hollow reed "breathing tube" so I don't risk dripping saliva on the page or touching my lips (and their greasy lip balm) to the artwork. But that's for later.

And now for the comparison. Look at the drop on the left, which was burnished, and contrast it with the one on the right, which was not. They're both shiny and satisfying, I'm not at all unhappy with either of them! But the one on the right has an ever-so-slight grainy look to it, a bit like velvet almost, while the one on the left is extremely smooth. That's the difference that burnishing makes. Ideally, you should be able to see your reflection (albeit distorted) in a finished piece of gilding. You're also supposed to be able to burnish the gold directly rather than through glassine paper, to achieve the highest polish possible.

I've never achieved either of those until the day I did these. I could literally see my face in the upper leaf on the left. Of course, something like that doesn't photograph well, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but it was amazing and I was thrilled.

Finally, I had one last experiment I wanted to try. I've done tooled gilding before, but that was over miniatum. That medium dries sort of soft, and was relatively easy to poke dimples into with a stylus. I wanted to see if it would be possible to tool gesso that had dried for two days and was hard, or if I would need to work it while it was still soft (and then have to figure out when was the right level of softness so as not to ruin it). I haven't replaced my styluses yet, but I did have a mechanical pencil that I decided to use to test the effect. The drop on the right got a row of dots courtesy of the end of the pencil (no lead), and they took surprisingly well. The gesso seems to require harder pressure to get the dots to go, which was about what I expected, but it did not crack or flake off the page as I feared it might.

All in all, this entire experiment was a success at every step. I learned a lot about how the gesso behaves, and got better results with it than I have with any modern recipe raised gilding medium, ever. I did also buy some of Mr. Tresser's flat gilding size, but I haven't tested it yet. I look forward to seeing how it behaves! In the meantime, it's been a week and I'm still glowing with how well this all turned out.

I hope you're all enjoying your quarantine, or the relaxing of restrictions depending where you live. Be safe, and be creative!

Online calligraphy and illumination class

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 23:30:00 +0000

It's been a bit since I posted. A house fire will do that, disrupt your routine a bit until you can get your feet back under you again.

But! I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about a thing that is happening now that my feet are mostly back under me again. I've restocked my art supplies, I have a little table space, and with the COVID quarantine, I have an excuse to teach an online class. In a way, if all goes well, this should work even better than an in-person class, since you all will get to watch over my shoulder while I work.

On Saturday, April 18, 2020, starting at 2pm Eastern time (US), I will be hosted on the Facebook page "RUM Community" in a three-hour demonstration of how to lay out an SCA scroll from start to finish. If all goes well, I'll actually manage to mostly finish the scroll in the allotted time frame! (Odds are actually slim, but I'm going to try!)

If you choose to follow along, we'll be creating a piece in this style:

The class will cover layout and margins, how to use a lettering guide, a bit on left-handed calligraphy, and we might go into selecting a good alphabet for your scroll. Then we'll cover this surprisingly quick illumination style from the late 1400s, some recommendations on tools and materials, and finish with the importance of outlining even though it's tedious.

If you want to follow along, you'll need:

Paper, any size, preferably heavy paper like "Bristol board" or heavy watercolor paper. I'll be using 11x14 inches, but a lot of scrolls are done in 9x12, or even 8x10, so don't fret too much about that.
Pencil
Ruler
If you own a lettering guide, I can show you how to use it.
For the calligraphy, a pen and ink; whatever size nib that is reasonable will be fine. I'll be using a Mitchell 3.5
Ideally also a pointy-nib pen like a crow quill or "mapping" pen for outlining stuff later.
For the illumination, definitely red, blue, and green paint, probably also white, a little bit of yellow might not be a bad idea, and then something gold and shiny if you have it.
A fine small brush, but don't go overboard. A 10/0 is overboard. You'll want something that will let you do all the fill in work as well as all the detailing. A 0 or even a 1 would work well. I'll probably try and get away with a 3 or a 4!

There are tools I still haven't replaced quite yet, so some of what I discuss will not be demonstrated, but in three hours I hope to be able to take you from start to finish on a piece this size.

The class will be hosted on Zoom, and hopefully also Facebook Live assuming the tech behaves. I'm also hoping that my setup will let people see my work and not just the top of my head while I work!

Watch this space for more information about another, shorter class to be held on Wednesday, April 29 at 7pm. That one will just talk about acanthus leaf illumination, and be done on a single Artist Trading Card.

Hope to see people in about a week's time!

A smaller Black Hours style painting

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 21:16:00 +0000

In September, a colleague of mine in the SCA earned our highest service award, the Order of the Pelican. She received a lovely official scroll through the usual channels, but I wanted to give her a gift anyway. And since I'd been on a bit of a kick with Black Hours pieces, I decided to go with that style for her present.

I ordered a small piece of black vellum from my supplier, only 4x6 inches, and got to work.

The pencil marks below probably don't show up very well in this lighting, but I promise you, I did start with a sketch.

The gold and silver Coliro paint behaved beautifully. You may notice gray smudges on the surface above; that's because I opted to pounce the vellum to remove any excess oils that it might have picked up from constant handling, and the pumice powder I used did not entirely wipe off. I was a bit disappointed, but the surface still is plenty dark enough to provide good contrast with the colors.

I was also especially pleased with how the wings on the pelican came out. (Yes, I know it looks like a swan. Medieval depictions of pelicans often did.)

After that, it was just a matter of adding in the colored areas, bit by bit. The red is above, and below are the blue and then green.

After that, it's time to highlight things, first with gold on the red, then with silver on the blue and green. I also added in one more blue flower that I'd missed on the first pass.

I love the definition that the highlights give!

And now it's time to fill in the fiddly bits, almost entirely in gold this time.

And finally, I outlined the border in silver, then signed the piece. The back of this piece of vellum was quite fuzzy, so I opted to sign on the front.

I've mentioned before that this style actually goes surprisingly quickly once you've got any animals or hidden figures finished. Since this border really didn't have any, the total time from start to finish was less than three hours. I knew I'd be able to do it quickly, but not that quickly!

Best of all, the recipient loved it. I was so happy to be able to make her happy.

My next post will be, oh, possibly my artist trading cards, or maybe something else. We shall see.

Wedding gargoyles

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 13:59:00 +0000

So I was working on the piece shown in my previous post, and sending photos to the client so she could see my progress, when the lady's fiancee reached out to me with a request. She wanted to surprise my client with their combined heraldic arms in a "full achievement", which is to say the shield, supporters on either side holding up the shield, a crest on top, and a mount and motto underneath. She had a number of requests, all of which were meaningful to them as a couple, and asked if they're was any way I could pull it off.

So I did.

First up was a mockup where I sketched everything in pencil, repeatedly, and then once I was satisfied, outlined it all in sharpie. The circles will be flowers in the final piece, including the one where a helmet would go on the crest.

Tracing the final design into my ground. I can't remember now whether I used vellum or perg, but I'm pretty sure it was vellum.

Let the painting begin! What you're seeing is called "impaled arms", where you either split the two devices right down the middle and then stitch them together, as I did here, or you squish the two devices to take up half the space, but still show everything on each device. So you'd have a whole dragon and scroll instead of halves.

I had a terrible time getting this flower to come out right, and I'm still not really happy with it even though the client loved it. This is just an in progress photo, though, so more will be added to it as we go.

I wanted to include this pic mainly to show the mixing palette in the corner of the photo. Color theory is kinda fascinating, and I'm really pleased with the gray I ended up with. I took two warm colors, an orangey red and another orangey yellow, but then a cool blue, and mixed them until I got a deep black. Adding white gave me a soft off slate blue-gray.

Side note: understanding color theory gives you so much more control over your palette! I don't usually like to mix colors from scratch, but i think I'll be doing it more often from here on out, because this worked so well.

All the base colors laid in. Now it's time to shade and highlight the gargoyles.

I was really, really pleased with how these gargoyles came out. I used a thin wash of a color I'd put together for the flower in the crest and applied that to the wing membranes, and it worked beautifully. I was so excited.

Another side note: after my work on the heraldry was done, I switched to a size 9 brush. This is gargantuan compared to what scribes usually use, typically in the 0 to 000 range. But it gave me much smoother strokes and allowed me to work more quickly.

I got bored and thought that the arms could use a little detail work themselves. This is known as diapering and was a traditional way to fill in large areas of color.

Finally, it was time to outline everything and put the motto in place at the bottom:

The words are from their wedding vows, and come from traditional ancient Roman weddings.

All in all, I was happy with everything except the large flower at the top... but I couldn't figure out a way to make it look good without adding more and more to it until it turned to mud. I was better off stopping where I did rather than ruining it completely.

The client and her wife loved it, regardless, and the looks on their faces were a joy to see. Plus we had ice cream together! So really, a good day all around.

Easy does it, continued

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 21:28:00 +0000

I hadn't realized I'd gone so long without updating the blog. I've certainly been busy scribing, but confidentiality and keeping certain pieces a surprise before they ate delivered meant I couldn't really post about my recent projects till now.

Here are some images from a project back in August. I think I'd gotten as far as the text, gilding, and beginning of the paint before I stopped posting about it. So here are the rest of the images:

Vine work added in the border and between the columns.

Filling in the green to add body to the vine work.

Finishing the seal and heraldry, adding the whitework, and highlighting the vines with gold

Close up of the seal

Text detail, with a bit of the vine work visible. I wanted to erase pencil marks, but the friction from the eraser caused some of the ink to smudge even though it had been dry for days.

Whitework details

Further whitework details, because why not; also some decent close ups of the smaller capitals.

The recipient's heraldry

All in all, this was a nice, relaxing piece to create for my client, and she was really happy with how it turned out.

Up next: the same client gets a surprise wedding gift from her wife.

Answering a question

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 16:07:00 +0000

I was thrilled to receive this question in my Tumblr ask box sometime last week:

anonymous asked:

Can you tell us about how you got into calligraphy and gilding? I find it really interesting but I’m not sure where to start!

Here follows my answer.

Oh, wow! Well, hmm. I was first introduced to calligraphy in art class in like 8th grade, but I didn’t come back to it until I became a member of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). The Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to learning about the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, but ALSO any culture that would have had contact with Europe during that time; and they’ve also recently removed their “earliest time period” cutoff, so now we also have ancient Romans and Iron Age Celts running around and playing. We dance the dances, eat the foods, and study the arts and sciences of the time period. It’s pretty romanticized, though, I mean, we tend to avoid things like plagues and witch burnings, and just generally try to recreate the best parts of those cultures; we sometimes call it “the Middle Ages as they should have been”.

Anyway. In the Society, it being pretty much all volunteer-operated, you can get recognition for your service to the organization or your local chapter or whatever, or you can also earn awards for your skills in various arts, crafts, or sports. When that happens, the “king and queen” of your regional area (your “kingdom”) hold a court, and call you and other people up one at a time to receive an award certificate called a scroll. A court herald reads them aloud, it’s all nice and ceremonial and a great way to honor people’s contributions.

We’re not going to print our award certificates off on the computer, thank you very much. :) That’s where scribes come in. I am a scribe.

There’s a whole scribal NETWORK of volunteers and coordinators, a whole system of figuring out who’s going to be awarded in the upcoming court, how many scrolls to produce, assigning those scrolls to various scribes, and collecting them when they’re done. Most of the time you have a week or two to complete your assignment; sometimes, however, the king and queen will spontaneously decide to award someone the day of their event, and a scroll has to be whipped up on short notice. This is jokingly referred to as “combat scribing”.

But yeah. I am a scribe. I made my first award scroll for the SCA in April of 2000, and I’ve been scribing off and on ever since. Lately I do fewer court scrolls or combat scrolls, and more things off the backlog (our backlog isn’t too extensive where I live, but sometimes a person gets an award and there wasn’t time to make their scroll, or the scribe it was assigned to was sick and couldn’t do it, or whatever). I also take commissions for things like poems, religious texts, wedding vows, and nifty stuff like that.

Outside of the scroll industry, some scribes also participate in various non-award-certificate projects, too, like making their own books or whatever. I’ve been part of a 75-person, five-year project called Calf to Codex, where we crafted a book completely from scratch, using donated deer hides to turn into parchment, authentic pigments that would have been used in the Middle Ages, ink made according to a period recipe, goose quills for pens, you name it. I wasn’t even allowed to use a pencil to sketch things; I was given a stick of lead!

And. It’s a little bit meta, but I’ve also earned awards for my skill and service in crafting awards. :) I’m not as good as some people in the Society, but I’m definitely not bad, either.

As for where to start, well, do you want to be part of a medieval organization and crank out certificates? Or does modern calligraphy interest you more? Or maybe you’re less of a “pen person” and more of a “brush person”, meaning you’d rather paint the decoration than write the text. I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of people tend to prefer one or the other, rather than doing both when they first start out. Is it specifically European (or Arabic! or Hebrew!), write-with-a-quill calligraphy that interests you, or do you think you could get into Asian write-with-a-brush calligraphy?

I’m useless at brush calligraphy, so I can’t really help you there, but I’d be happy to give you tips for just about anything else.

Oh! You asked about gilding, too. Gilding is a whole separate skill. Gold leaf is SUPER thin and lightweight, much lighter than even tissue paper, and takes patience and a gentle touch to get used to manipulating. There are things you can do to make it easier, and it’s not something I’ll tell you not to try, because it’s gorgeous - just be aware you may want to wait a bit to develop your skills before you tackle working with real gold.

Tell me more! Or visit my chat window. Let’s talk about what you want to do, and I’ll try to point you in the right direction.

And thanks SO MUCH for this ask! I love to talk about this stuff, as you can plainly see. :)

Easy does it

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 21:23:00 +0000

I've got another scroll commission, and the best part about this one is that it's not anything crazy! Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun doing those Black Hours pieces, and the fancy stuff before that. But it's nice to come up for air once in a while and do something that's not too complicated, something I don't have to worry about too much.

This is a second scroll for a client, but all she requested was that I make it pretty to go with the first piece she had. I decided to keep the two column layout of her original piece, but a change in style meant that I had room to add more wording.

I also got to employ a nice batarde script from about 1475 to 1490 here. I like it because it's fairly cursive and therefore quick to write, but still elegant.

Instead of gilding, I opted to go with my Coliro/ Finetec metallic paint for all the initials and capitals. It saved a little time in the short term since I was able to skip a step (usually it would paint adhesive, then gild), but in the long term, I'm not sure it really saved me anything. Painting around gold is pretty easy because the metal resists the paint. Painting around painted letters doesn't have that advantage, so I had to slow down and make sure I didn't get sloppy.

All in all though, the slowest part of this piece has been the decision making process! The vines I had originally planned were going took take up too much space and not really leave room for leaves, so I'll be changing styles a little from what my first vision of this piece was going to be.

The new vines will be done in ink, with smaller, more delicate leaves. They fit the time period of the alphabet a little better, as well as taking up less room on the page.

Anyway, there's where I am as of a couple days ago. I hope to get more time to work tomorrow!

I hope your days are peaceful and that you are surrounded by beauty wherever you go.

My second Black Hours scroll

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 21:18:00 +0000

Now that it's finished and the recipient has seen it, here are progress pics for my second Black Hours piece. Like the first, this one is modeled off the Sforza Black Hours, and is on black vellum. Unlike the first one, though, I learned from my mistakes and did not try to gild anything this time around. All the shiny is done with Coliro/ Finetec metallic paints, including the calligraphy.

I still learned a lot, though. For starters, my shading technique when I first started out did not give me the results I wanted, at all. My acanthus leaves looked okay, but the brush strokes were much too robust on the figure of a mermaid in the border, giving her what looked like a hairy chest.

Special thanks to phenomenal scribe Mark Calderwood for taking the time to chat with me, from Australia at odd hours, to teach me how to solve the problem. I had to completely scrape off this version of the mermaid and start over, with this as the result:

Obviously she still needs detail work at this point, but thinning the paint and letting it build up in opacity, as well as using much smaller brush strokes, gave me much better results than trying to shade everything with the paint at full strength.

I also learned the value of pouncing my vellum to remove excess oils from handling, which were causing the paint to bead as the oils resisted it (as in the pic below). It was amazing the difference a little gum sandarac made when I ran into trouble... and the difference would have been even better if I had pounced before I even started. Lesson learned!

So without further ado, here come the progress photos...

Text mockup. I always do a mockup (well, almost always) to make sure the text will fit!

Testing the Coliro silver on a scrap. It works great!

The finished text block in silver and gold, and the main elements of the border penciled in.

Here and below, some close up shots of the various initials and capitals.

Another mer-person in the border, this time carrying a sword and wearing armor. Not sure how that helps him swim, but okay.

Another figure, riding a rabbit like beast. This one was also supposed to be shaded, but the vellum was resisting the paint badly enough that I had to add ox gall to it, and that erased all distinction in my brush strokes.

The border with most of the silver laid in. At this point, I was discouraged enough about the hairy chested mermaid that I procrastinated taking any further steps for about two weeks.

It's amazing how the border starts to come together with just the acanthus leaves added in. These types of borders actually go pretty quickly once they're sketched out. It's just painting in the flowers and leaves, shading, and then connecting everything with stems. After that, you fill in any empty spaces that are remaining with tendrils and other fiddly bits.

The blue and brown added, with the beginning of red. The mer-soldier's armor looks bronze; it's actually brown highlighted with gold. (Thanks to Mark Calderwood again for that tip.)

I don't often paint with brown, actually. To be honest, I rarely mix colors at all. So I'm happy with how this came out, especially on the rabbit beast. It's really more of a dark orange, made with yellow ochre and a warm red.

The mermaid with more details added. Around her, you can see where the blue gave me trouble.

Red and green complete. Most of the area is filled in and now it's time to shade or highlight things with silver and gold, then play "connect the dots" with stems and vines.

Ironically, in period many black hours didn't survive because the paint flaked off. I used a different green paint this time around, and it didn't want to stick. It dried, then cracked and tried to come off in several places.

The silver has a tendency to glare under my lighting, so I've been taking pictures with the mermaid in shadow to let more detail come through.

The award is going to a man who makes parchment. I spoke with him and got a general idea of what kind of clothing he likes to wear, then stuck him in front of a parchmenter's frame. He's holding a curved knife called a lunellum to scrape the hide to an even thickness.

Here we are with gold highlights added to the red and brown.

Adding the silver highlights. I really like the before and after effect here in these flowers.

And once again, here is the finished piece. The empty roundels in the border will be filled with wax seals once the scroll is delivered.

Again, using shadows to help show off details that would otherwise be obscured by the glare of the overhead lights.

Of the two mer-people, I think I like the soldier's tail better.

I'm not entirely sure the figure here needed as much silver added as I gave him, by he doesn't look bad, so I guess it's okay.

Hidden bird says hello.

And that's it! As always, my thanks go to everyone who has offered a kind word, either here or on Facebook, or elsewhere. I really appreciate the encouragement.

Cheers!

Various and sundry

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 12:46:00 +0000

In case anyone's been curious, I have been busy with scribal stuff, but my recipient wants to be surprised, so I've been resisting the urge to post progress pictures of my work. It's another Black Hours piece and it's coming together nicely, though. I think I'll share one pic to give you an idea:

That's from almost a month ago. I had never made a letter out of flowers and foliage before, so it was an interesting challenge.

The piece shouldn't really have taken so long to finish, but I ran into a problem when I made a mistake trying to shade a figure in the border. She's supposed to be a reasonable looking mermaid, and instead she came out looking like she had a hairy chest because I messed up with the brush strokes... I got advice for how to fix her, but I procrastinated a couple of weeks before climbing back into the metaphorical saddle and actually fixing her.

Fortunately she looks much better now. I seem to have deleted my "before" picture, or I'd show you that.

So. I've been doing some calligraphy, and I have two more pieces in my queue once this one is done, but I can't show you anything quite yet.

In other news, I've resurrected an office aquarium that I used to have on my desk at my last job... fourteen years ago... and set it up on my desk at my new job! I'm still waiting for it to settle and the plants I bought to root into the soil before I add any fish, but there are a few snails in there already. Right now it looks like this:

Not too fancy, but hopefully pretty. I already find myself just watching how the plants move in the water flow, even without any fish, even I'm between tasks at work.

Hope you all are well. Life here is pretty good. Cheers!

Black Hours, final

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 13:58:00 +0000

I can hardly believe it's finished, but here we are. My first Black Hours piece has been a terrific learning experience, and I'm glad I did it. I look forward to tackling my next Black Hours piece in just a week or two, and I'll definitely be using what I learned here to make the process go faster. My vellum supplier has also really appreciated the feedback I've sent him on his early attempts at making black vellum, and says that he will be taking different approaches to the process going forward.

Without further ado, here are all the pictures:

The last time I posted, I had not yet added the green; here we are with the leaves and a couple more bits of fruit added. The green is probably a darker shade than they used in period, and doesn't show up well against the black by itself, but that's what highlighting is for. We'll get to that step farther down.

For now, it's time to begin filling in all the empty space with more stems, leaves, and fiddly bits -- tendrils and such -- in gold, with a little silver here and there just for variety. To give you an idea, here's the first corner begun:

You can really see the difference here, and how all the detailing pulls together the relatively "loose" elements of the design, bringing the flowers and leaves into a harmoniously balanced whole.

Above, a closer look at the bird with his red legs, and a couple of silver additions in the form of a leaf and flower blossom, with no color added.

The name of the award for which this scroll is being given is the Order of the Dragon's Heart. It's a service award, not given out very often, and is considered something of a big deal. Here, the badge is done in Coliro/Finetec silver, and green paint. Once the text was done, I put my gold leaf away completely. This silver won't tarnish over time, as the text will.

About halfway done with the border; compare the right side with the left to get a feel for what a big difference the detailing makes.

The seal of the Middle Kingdom; I had a lot of fun rendering it in this style, rather than going for opaque red and silver. Again, the green didn't show very well against the black, so I've highlighted the dragon and laurel wreath in Coliro gold. If you look below the seal, you can also see where I've highlighted the red flowers in gold. Blue and green details will be highlighted in silver.

The photos above and below were an entertaining comparison shot; I was showing the lady who gave me this assignment my progress and noting that for some reason the green just was not showing up in the photo, even though it was visible just fine in person. The photo below is meant to just show how well the badge "lit up" green when taken from another angle. I have no idea why that was the case.

Here we are now with all the vine work added in gold; it's time to go back in, highlight the blue and green details in silver, and then add a silver outline around the entire border. I'm so close to being done!

To give you an idea of what a difference the silver detailing makes, here's a pair of before-and-after shots of a section of border. The red flower has already been highlighted in gold, but look at how you can barely make out the green leaf just above it. The blue flowers show up okay, but not great.

And now, after: The flowers remind me of butterflies, and the leaf is finally picked out against the black.

And here is the completed piece! The silver outline helps define the edge of the border and really gives it a finished look. I love how crisp and clean it makes things.

A slightly different angle here, to get the bottom of the border to catch the light a little better.

And finally, another pair of closeup shots of the seal and badge, because they turned out so well. I especially like the texturing of the red around the dragon, on the seal.

I can hardly believe it's finished! This scroll represented over a month of work, with occasional days off. The slowest part was the gilding of the text, and I've since learned that in period that wasn't actually done (although I still want to double check with experts who've done this before). If I were to skip gilding and just write the letters in silver and gold paint, that would have gone much faster. I've also seen imitation scrolls like this one where the calligrapher simply used white ink, and those look fine too.

I am now down to three or four scribal projects to complete. One is another Black Hours for the supplier of all this vellum! Then, I've got a scroll replacement to do for a client, then a knighting scroll for the same guy I did the King's Chalice for... and finally, I've been asked to do a lady's Laurel scroll "sometime in the next five years" as a challenge of my skills. Because Laurels like to push artists to do more art, step out of their comfort zone, and expand their limits... and this particular lady is a scribal Laurel, so she gets to push me. I'm still thinking of what I'd like to try for her, but it's got to be good.

Thank you all, once again, for your comments and questions. I really appreciate them.

Black Hours, part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 23:35:00 +0000

With the text block finished, it was finally time to move on to the fun part: as elaborate as they seem, vine work borders are actually not too complicated to do, and they are surprisingly quick, too, once you get used to how they lay out; being set on a black ground isn't really going to change that. First, I wanted to do a light pencil sketch for the largest areas, the acanthus leaves which will be done in silver and gold.

For some reason, the pencil that was sold to me as "chalk" behaved a lot like a wax colored pencil instead, and also the strange properties of this vellum meant that in some places the marks were very faint indeed. In the end, in a few areas, I ended up using a regular pencil that left a visible impression in the waxy residue on the vellum. It isn't visible as a mark but as almost a scratch. I'm not sure this photo really captures it well; you may mostly just see the waxy sheen of the vellum itself.

Finally, though, it was time to start laying in the acanthus leaves. These tend to be the largest elements of a vine border, along with any "grotesques" or "drolleries": monsters, birds, people, or animals either hidden in the vines or engaging in silly activities. In general, you want to fit your largest stuff in first, then work your way down in size until you're filling in small details at the end.

Note how I've also outlined the text block with a ruling pen; the source material didn't include a perfect rectangle around the entire text block, but only went up to the bottom of the capital on the left hand side and didn't go across the top of the block at all.

Here I've finished some preliminary vine work prior to taking off on vacation for a week. I wanted to get a feel for how it would look and how the paint would behave. These are Coliro (formerly known as Finetec) mica-based paints, and they are wonderful.

Below, I've finished the silver acanthus leaves, as well as two creatures that were part of the source material. They were hidden so well that I didn't notice them at first, until I started breaking he decoration down into its basic elements like this.

The vellum did continue to give me some trouble with the paint; if you look below you can see where the gold is a little blotchy in places.

On the suggestion of one of my feedback experts, I tried adding other ingredients to the paint, including ox gall (which we thought might react with the fats and allow the paint not to bead) and gum arabic (which, being a tree sap, makes paint a bit more "sticky"), but the best result seemed to come from working with as little water as possible, so that the paint would stick rather than beading on the surface.

Below, most of the gold now is finished. I will have to go back after my flowers and things are added to put in stems, leaves, and little fiddly bits like that, but the bulk of the gold is finally done.

I could have chosen to work the gold acanthus leaves first and then finish with the silver; it was entirely arbitrary that I felt like working with the silver first instead.

Here are a couple of detail closeup shots, one of the fiddly bits around the I...

And another of the filigree I added around the D. The I decoration was in my source material, but the D I had to more or less invent. I think it mostly fits the theme and style of the page.

Detail shots of the two critters hidden in the vines; above, a bird (it will have red legs added), and below, a grotesque with a sort of beast or goblin's head, bird's body, and animal legs with cloven hooves.

Finally, at long last, the bulk of the gold and silver are done! I will still have to go back and add stems, leaves, and shading later, but the large areas are done. Now it's time to move on to the colors, and also not coincidentally step down to a slightly smaller scale of "thing to be added in". The blue will be almost exclusively flowers, the red will be both flowers and fruit, mainly; I haven't started the green yet, but when I get there, there are only a couple of fruits and the rest will be large leaves to add to the overall background.

Here above, the blue is mostly complete; I thought it was entirely done, but when I went back to start the red, I discovered areas where the source had been damaged and blue areas were missing. You may remember from my first post that every surviving example of a Black Hours is damaged in some fashion.

Below, the rest of the red has been added. The fruits look a lot like strawberries to me, and the detailing on them suggests gold seeds and little hairs, so I'm pretty sure that's what they're supposed to be.

And that's where I am as of today! Tomorrow, in other news, I start my new job, so it will be a bit before I'm able to come back and finish this with the green, and then the rest of the gold and silver detailing, but I'm really looking forward to seeing how it comes out.

Thanks again for all your comments and questions! I really appreciate them.

Black Hours, continued

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 20:47:00 +0000

The last time I posted, I had only just gotten the first two lines of gold text into my scroll, and all was right with the world. I was young and naive and idealistic, and believed everything with this scroll was going to go as planned.

That'll teach me to make plans.

This particular piece of vellum that I'm working on was made with a process that the supplier is still refining, with the result that it had some imperfections I didn't spot until it was too late. The overall surface of the vellum was mostly fine, but it had some fatty or waxy spots that were a disaster to try and gild. Gold, if you may recall, loves to stick to oils and fats. So while the first few lines came out okay...

... after a while, I started encountering areas where the excess gold did not simply brush away from the vellum.

There were also discolored areas where ther dye didn't quite take. I was less concerned about those, but wanted to give my supplier feedback (as he had requested, to help him refine his process).

Scraping excess gold meant that sometimes dye and waxy residue would also come off the vellum:

And the sticking only got worse, as I got into a larger problem area than I had originally realized.

To repair these areas, I had to take my scalpel and scrape gold away around each individual letter, a slow and painstaking process that resulted in many mistakes. At one point, I got so frustrated that I just gave up and erased the entire word, as you see below:

If I had been thinking, I would have stopped, found a different approach, and started over on a different piece of vellum. Instead, I kept going. It was a learning experience if nothing else, right? If I ever encounter this problem again, I will definitely know how to fix it.

The problem area kept expanding into my lines of text:

And my excess gold flakes stuck to the page everywhere the waxy residue could be found, for example the right side margin here.

I really felt like the lettering was getting ragged and uneven, being shaped as it was by a scalpel almost more than by a pen. My feedback expert, however, insisted that it looked fine and I was being too hard on myself.

Here's a close up of a badly damaged word, "Crown". The gilding size left a slightly raised shape that allowed me to see most of the letter shapes through the gold, so first I traced around them with the very tip of my scalpel blade:

And then I would scrape away the excess little by little, revealing the word hidden underneath.

Finally, I made it to the last line of text. You can just see it shining in black through the gilding adhesive here, as well as the "rex" and "regina" areas where the king and queen are expected to add their names. Ironically, I managed to escape the worst of the waxy areas and the final line mostly behaved itself.

And finally, the full text block.

Several days' worth of work, thankfully at an end. I expect the illumination to go much, much more quickly.

When I posted these photos to a scribes group on Facebook, a professional calligrapher asked me why I gilded it instead of writing with shell silver and gold. I slapped my forehead quietly, then responded that my understanding was that gilding like this was what they had done in period. Now I suspect that I'm wrong, and did all that work for nothing.

Sigh. Learning experiences, man. Sometimes they kinda bite.

The next piece I do in this style, owing to the nature of the dyed and sealed vellum being sort of waxy, I will use my Finetec/ Coliro mica based paints, and skip the actual gilding entirely. Doing that will completely avoid all the problems I encountered, as well as give me a more consistent look, because the gold in the text will match the gold in the border. My gold paint is slightly darker compared to the genuine gold, which looks quite pale in comparison.

My vellum supplier is actually quite happy with all the feedback I've given him, despite the frustrations, because it's told him a lot about his own process and ways he can improve upon it. He'll be sending me test swatches here in a couple of weeks for me to play with as I please. I'll probably work with pounce, no pounce, gilding, scraping, sanding, you name it, to put the pieces through their paces.

As of today, I have actually started on the illumination, but I opted to save those pictures for another post. Hopefully I'll have something to show you on that front in a couple weeks' time.

Thanks to everyone who follows this blog, and comments either here or elsewhere! I really appreciate it.

First "Black Hours" piece

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Wed, 15 May 2019 15:20:00 +0000

It's time for me to gear up for an artistic challenge: a scroll done in the style of the Sforza Black Hours.

In case you're wondering "What's a Sforza Black Hours?", I will tell you that there was a short-lived fad of conspicuous consumption among the filthy rich of the Flemish courts in around the 1480s, wherein their Books of Hours were made on pages that had been dyed black. The lettering, rather than being done in ink, was made by gilding with silver and gold. The paints were accented with more of the same; the effect was striking, especially to the modern eye.

Because of the way that black Books of Hours were made, most of them deteriorated badly within a relatively short time; either the vellum disintegrated as a result of the dye used, or the page was blackened with carbon instead, and this caused the paint to flake off. There are now only seven extant examples of black hours in existence, and all of them are damaged. One, the "Sforza" Black Hours, was in such poor condition that the book was dismantled completely, and its pages preserved between sheets of glass, in order to save it.

Here are three examples of Black Hours books: the New York Hispanic Society Black Hours, the Morgan Black Hours, and the Sforza Black Hours. (Several more images of the Sforza are also available here.) They are all noticeably distinct from one another in their border decoration, which means that as an artist, I have a lot of room to play if I decide I want to work on a black ground to create a piece. Ultimately, I chose to attempt to imitate the Sforza Black Hours, because it's got more range of color than the others.

This scroll is going to be an overdue award for a lady in my SCA kingdom, which means that certain wording is required, which means I need to test the text out and make sure I get everything to fit in the text block. Here's a test of the wording and the first mockup; I ended up doing three mockups before I was really satisfied with the spacing.

Next, it was time to test the gilding on the black vellum. I'm not really worried about gold sticking to my gilding size, but this particular sheet of vellum is a little "waxy" from leftover fats from the vellum-making process, and I wanted to be sure everything would still look good. I also wanted to make sure I could write with the gilding size and not have it come out too blobby or unreadable because it's too thin compared to my usual inks.

Test writing with the gilding size

Here it is, gilded with 12-karat white gold, and I think it looks all right. I could wish for a little cleaner thin lines in the letters themselves, but all in all this is definitely workable.

Finally, it was time to test the paints themselves and make sure that they would show up against the black, and also make sure I could get the style right. With vine work, I have a tendency to think everything is overcrowded when it's really not, with the result that my stuff ends up being too open. This time, though, I think I got it just right.

The only trouble I had with paints was with my first blue choice, which was too dark and didn't show against the black. Adding a smidgen of white to brighten it was all I needed to do.

The gold and silver here are mica-based paints from Coliro, formerly known as Finetec. They sell individual colors for about $5 a pan, and have a broad palette of metallic and pearl colors in most shades of the rainbow. Most SCA scribes are only interested in their silver and gold, of which they have several shades, but I do know of one scribe who creates her Black Hours scrolls entirely in metallic paints in multiple colors, for effect.

So, that's the past several days of preparation. Today I went ahead and prepared the sheet of vellum for writing, trying to get some more of that waxy residue off of it, then marked my margins and lines for the text block, and gilded my first bit of text.

That looks pretty promising to me, what do you think?

I look forward to your comments and questions!

Some fun initials

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 20:33:00 +0000

Hello all,
I'm working on another calligraphy project, but I'm not sure how many photos I'm allowed to share of it. I couldn't resist a little, though, so here we are.

Back in 2015, I participated in a collaborative project called "Calf to Codex", along with about 75 other poets, flax growers, parchment makers, chicken farmers, a silkworm farmer, calligraphers, pigment grinders, illuminators, bookbinders, and leather workers; we took about five years from start to finish altogether, and successfully crafted a beautiful book of stories and poems from our Society's history.

This year we're beginning Codex 2, which will actually comprise two slim volumes. Unlike the first codex, these are being written on handmade paper from Twinrocker Paper in Brookston, Indiana. The style of the first codex was modeled after the early 1400s, while this one is mid-1500s Italy.
Since the book isn't finished, I'm not sure what I'm allowed to share yet. But I figured it wouldn't be a breach of privacy to show you the whitevine initials from a few of the pages.

You'd think I'd be sick of gilding after the previous project, but I still enjoy it... especially in the smaller doses that today's gilding presented. It's just so much fun to go from this:

... to this!

Following that, as always, comes the paint. Unlike a lot of other illumination styles, whitevine is actually more complicated to draw than it is to paint. Once you've got the vines figured out, all you have to do is color in the areas around them to help them stand out.

Outline in blue, fill in with red and green...

And you're almost done. Once these are dry, I'll probably go back and soften the larger areas with little white dots arranged in triangles. Then there's an optional step where you shade the vines to give them a little more depth, which I'm thinking about skipping... but knowing me I'll probably do it anyway.

I did four initials today, and have three more to go. I'd have liked to do them all today, but being on loose book pages means I have to let these letters dry, so that I can flip the paper over and work on the other side. Here are pages 1, 3, 6, and 8, all together:

The text exemplar is a writing manual originally published in 1522, which is currently available as a PDF. It's a new script for me and has been fun to learn; the biggest challenge has been getting used to writing the letters on a slant, instead of straight up and down like I'm used to with every other alphabet I write. Love those flourishes, though!

As always, I welcome your questions and comments. Cheers!

County scroll, part 18: final

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 21:28:00 +0000

I admit, it has been a bit since my last post; other commitments, plus a bit of unwillingness to sit at the table, kept me from getting any work done. But! Over the past two or three days, I've finally gotten back into it, finished the outlining, and purchased the semiprecious gemstones that will go in the four corners of the figure. All that is left for me to do is glue the stones in place, and I will be finished.

First, I needed to finish coloring in the right hand border. I used strips of every color in the palette, but the palette was so limited that I ended up repeating a couple of colors. After that, I worked the outlining in stages over a period of three days. Every bend in every knot, every bit of gold, silver, or copper, it all got outlined. And to be fair, it was less of a slog than I feared it would be, but I'm still glad I broke up the work.

It's always so neat to me to see the way each step of the process adds a little bit more to the overall effect of the piece.

Here it is with the border about halfway done. You can zoom in and compare the left side to the right, especially on the knots, and see the difference the outlining makes in sharpening everything.

Above, a pic of the whole piece at this stage. Below, a little up close detail:

And some more, again you can see the difference between left and right with the figure's hair:

The one problem I experienced was that the white paint I used was a different formula from everything else (Doc Martin's Bleed Proof White, if you're curious), and the bleed proof nature of the paint made it actually resist the outlining and any attempts to paint over it. Remember earlier, when I accidentally painted white over one of the eyes? Yeah. Trying to correct that was surprisingly difficult. If you look closely at the left eye you can see where the line is a little ragged. That's from the brown paint physically beading up rather than going down in a nice smooth line over the white.

Once again, a well behaved brush makes life so much easier. Also good paint consistency, because you really don't want your paint to suddenly blob all over the place. I was well pleased with how both behaved, even though it's looking like this brush may need to be retired soon. Its point is developing a bit of a curve, which I can still work with, but I'll have to keep an eye on it in future.

Middle Kingdom seal. You can see where the outlining around the eye gave me a bit of difficulty. Again, the paint not wanting to behave on top of the white.

Finally, it was time to go to the local treasure house that is Von's Beads and Gifts. They have the largest collection of glass beads in the Midwest, and the largest collection of stone beads in the continental United States. There is an entire room devoted to freshwater pearls, and another set aside for tumbled stones and crystals. If you are ever in the area and decide to go there, be sure to bring a chaperone. Just to give you an idea...

That's a 350-lb. sphere of smoky quartz, next to a number of carved stone chess sets. Yes, it's for sale. Von's is awesome.

But back to the topic...

I wanted amethysts originally, because the recipient's heraldry includes purple as its main color, but in the end I went with polished ametrine, a blend of amethyst and citrine which is a yellow or orange stone. The ametrine just happened to be a bit clearer and darker purple, on the day I went shopping. You can see a bit of yellow on the tip of one of the stones below. These were just about three dollars apiece:

I haven't glued the stones down yet (I'll be using a flexible superglue called E6000), but here's a tentative placement of them on the scroll:

I'll probably change the angle of the top two stones so that they point inward, like the bottom stones are doing. But this gives you an idea of what the finished piece will look like.

And that's it! I'll likely go to the copy shop and get a copy of this for my portfolio, then glue the stones in place, and then it will be ready to deliver for signatures from our area "king and queen". After that, it will be handed off to the recipient, hopefully during a "royal court" so that more people can see it in person.

Thanks to everyone who has offered questions and comments on the piece throughout the entire process! I've appreciated your company and encouragement.

My next posts will probably be about the next Calf to Codex project, "Codex 2," for which I will be doing some calligraphy and a very little illumination -- just some capital letters, one on each page. After that, look forward to me attempting not one but two Black Hours scrolls.

Thanks again!

County scroll, part 17

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 14:29:00 +0000

Painting continued yesterday and the day before, and is now almost complete. First, though, here is a picture of my assistant, Misty, who occasionally gets up in my lap if she feels I'm not giving her enough attention. She enjoys watching me work, and I enjoy her being far enough from the table that she can't bat at my tools and paints.

Most of today's photos are just stages of color being added in bit by bit, including the purple I'd mentioned and was so excited about. I'm also pretty excited about how well my brush behaves. Get yourself a brush that comes to a needle sharp point, and you'll be able to manage terrific detailing like this:

Those tight places around the fingers were a bit of a challenge, but my brush was up to it.

Here we are with the purple complete, and some yellow detailing added on the birds and around the knots:

I finished out the day with white, and made a small mistake that will be covered up later, so that the figure now looks like it is winking at us:

So that was Thursday.
Friday, before I started, the sun was coming in my window at just the right angle so that the colors actually showed up on my camera in their correct hues, rather than being so dark that people keep complimenting "the black" which is actually green. So now you can finally see what I'm talking about!

I also took a pic of my palette, showing some of the colors I'm using, in an attempt to get the colors rather than the super darkened versions you see every time I try to take a picture with all that reflective gold around.

This is a palette I reuse a lot, so it's got those blue shades I won't be using on this scroll, but the orange was mixed up fresh just for the occasion. Here it is on the piece.

I'm especially pleased with how well it showed up as detailing against the green:

And finally, for Friday, I added the red and then stopped, because I wasn't feeling well:

The recipient had red hair at the time this award was originally given, and was known as the "Archer Queen", which is why the figure is holding an arrow instead of St. Matthew's book and crozier in the original image.
When I'm feeling better, I'll come back to this piece and do dark brown or black for the shoes and facial features, and then it'll be time to outline everything. Outlining is usually my least favorite step, not because it doesn't make things look good (it really makes them look terrific), but because by the time I'm ready to outline, I'm usually tired of the piece and ready to stop, and outlining often goes slowly because there's a lot of territory to cover. So it feels like a slog, even though it's necessary and important.
That's it for today! As always, thanks for the suggestions and comments.

County scroll, part 16

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:37:00 +0000

At long last, the gilding was completed and I started painting today! All I had left to do was touch up some bare spots and mottled areas, like this one:

The differences are subtle on this camera, partly because of the lighting, but I'm really pleased with how much cleaner everything looks now.

At long last, it was time to say goodbye to and put away all these tools: from left to right, my agate "dog tooth" burnisher, one of the brushes I used for painting miniatum, my soft brush for getting rid of excess leaf, and my reverse elbow tweezers for handling leaf. They are all resting on a glassine envelope, which is used in burnishing as a barrier between the leaf and the burnisher so you don't rub the leaf right back off the page, and surrounded by my bottle of miniatum and three scrap containers full of copper, 12-karat white gold, and 23-karat gold.

Even though I was ready to paint, first I had some debate about what colors to use before I could start. My source materials are not at the best resolution, nor, I suspect, at the best color faithfulness to the original manuscript. I've seen the same St. Matthew page in several different brightness levels across the internet, for example, and sometimes his robe looks red and other times more of a burgundy purple. I had to settle on a green shade, and I had to talk myself out of using any blue, because the sources didn't have any. (It was really tempting to use anyway because it would have looked excellent next to these metals. Oh well.)

Instead I got to use a nice obnoxious pink.

In all the photos that follow, my colors look artificially dark, due to the camera dimming the exposure because of light reflecting off all that metal. Here's what the pink and green I did today actually look like (yes, those are seashells, long story) :

Compare that to how dark the green is in these close ups, where it can be mistaken for black if you didn't know any better.

I promise, it looks better in person. You can see how filling in the bodies of the critters makes all that knotwork suddenly make sense, though. And the kingdom seal is going to look nifty done in this style.

Just about the only photo I got that even comes close to showing the colors accurately was of the right hand border around the text, where I'm using color to help the knotwork band stand out a little.

Man, that is a bubblegum pink, isn't it? In addition to these colors, I'll be using an equally obnoxious orangey yellow, reddish orange, red, the burgundy sort of purple I already mentioned, white, and brown. It's a very limited palette, with no shading to speak of. For the most part I'll just be filling in the colors where they belong, adding minor detail in only a few areas, and then outlining. The outlining will probably take longer than the painting itself.

Still, I'm happy to have put gilding behind me for this piece! As much as I enjoy gilding ordinarily, and as much as I've learned from this go-round, this step has gone on long enough.

Thanks as always for your questions and comments, whether it's here on my blog or via Facebook, Tumblr, Discord, or any of the other places I share these posts. I appreciate the chance to talk about my work.

County scroll, part 15

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 20:51:00 +0000

The main gilding is finished! Finally!

Here's the before and after pic for today's work. The first is the adhesive I laid down...

And the second here is all the gold laid in...

There are still a few bare spots to touch up, but overall, I'm quite pleased. And of course, I have some mottling to deal with, where the silver stick to the copper, or the gold stuck to the silver. The worst of those areas is up here on the top right corner:

But I can deal with all of that tomorrow and finally be ready to paint!

I can identify very well with the scribes of old who wrote complaints and comments about their work into the margins of the old manuscripts. Deo gratia, deo gratia, et iterum deo gratia, indeed.

County scroll, part 14

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Bungard-Janney) — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 21:04:00 +0000

Not much happened today on the gilding front, but I'm happier with the results than I've been for quite some time. I only laid the miniatum adhesive in on these areas:

I tried something a little different this time; where in previous gilding stages I had tried to lay the gold down quickly in an attempt to avoid bare spots, I had unfortunately ended up with the adhesive shrinking a little as it dried, leaving the gold above it with minuscule wrinkles in the finish. Miniatum advertises a "mirror smooth" finish if it's done right, but my impatience has really affected that.

So today, I slowed back down a little bit, and gave the miniatum more time to dry. A couple of hours, I think. But I also went back and "reactivated" it by breathing on it really really heavily, like fogging a mirror, prior to laying the gold leaf down on top of it. I had been remembering to breathe on it in previous sessions as well, but either I wasn't doing it enough, or I was moving too slowly and letting the fog evaporate before I could get the gold laid down. In any case, that was how I was ending up with bare spots. Today, however, a combination of the ares being both smaller and easier to mask meant that I could fog them thoroughly, lay the gold down in one go, brush it away, and have almost no bare spots to speak of.

I'm actually really happy with how today's work turned out:

The only real downside I see here is that, to my eye, there is a noticeable difference in brightness between today's gilding and the areas I'd done previously. It's not horrible, and since I didn't let the miniatum sit overnight, it may still wrinkle a little further as it finished drying, in which case the areas will all match.

But I'm so close to being done! All I have left to gild now is the outer border, and then go back and touch up some of the white gold and copper, where they've gotten mottled by other metals. After that, I'll be ready to paint, which I'm really looking forward to.

As always, your comments and questions are welcome and appreciated. Cheers!