peteyfrogboy

So at Pennsic this year I took a class on gilding over at the Guild Mirandola merchant booth, and it was lots of fun. I got to play with gold and learn about various different adhesive substances (aka "sizes") used to stick it to paper or parchment. Some of them were not the sort of thing you'd have lying around the house (fish glue, gum ammoniac), while others could be made from things you could find at any grocery store.

( Glair )

( Garlic Juice )

My lovely wife adelavanbrugge has offered to create my Laurel scroll. She's started prep work for it, and I convinced her to post about it. It's kind of strange to watch my own scroll get made, but also fun. :)

I wanted to celebrate the fact that there would be two reigning queens at Pennsic this year with an interest in dance (Eridani of Trimaris and Judith of Drachenwald), so I decided to emulate Caroso's practice of writing sonnets dedicated to women of high station. I laid them out as two facing manuscript pages, written in a humanist hand with a relatively simple illuminated initial. I presented them at HRM Eridani's River of Stars ball on Monday evening.

adelavanbrugge received a request a couple weeks ago for a scroll for Kingdom Arts & Sciences (which was this weekend). Rather than try to find someone else to complete it on such short notice, we decided to take care of it in-house. To keep the layout simple, I suggested we base it on this page from Poggio Bracciolini's Orationes in Laurentium Vallam (c. 1485). It's a relatively simple example of Italian white vinestem that doesn't require a full page border, but is still attractive. I laid out the design in pencil, then transfered it via light box to a sheet of Pregamenata. I made two mistakes when inking the design: 1) the pen I chose was actually a very narrow oblique rather than a crow quill, so the lines came out a bit wide, and 2) the ink I randomly chose from what was already set up was Higgins Black Magic, which, as it turns out, gold is very happy to stick to.

Once I got the initial inked, I turned it over to adelavanbrugge for text and gilding. This is a relatively new hand for her, but I think it turned out very well. It's a very modern looking hand, which is not surprising as it's the basis for a large number of modern typefaces.

After the gold was applied, I got the scroll back to do a quick paint job. This style is very paint-by-numbers, so I just kept alternating red-green-blue until everything was filled in and then put little trios of white dots everywhere they would fit. The example I was working from appears to have left the vines themselves unpainted, without even any shading that I can see, so that made things go a lot faster. I also went back and re-inked the places where the gold had stuck to the lines with a technical pen.