Scroll Blank - Lion - Inhabited Initial - 2015

This was a project that I did for the 2015 Ice Dragon Pentathlon as Scribal Work - Illumination.

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Scroll Blank

Description:

Scroll of an inhabited initial P inspired by a 12th century English Psalter  Gouache and ink on pergamenta.

Details of the original image:

MS G.43 fol. 100v  Psalter (MS G.43). England, perhaps Canterbury, ca. 1180. Lion playing horn within decorated initial P. Beginning of Psalm 119:161 (Vulg., 118:161). From Corsair, the Morgan Library & Museum online image database. The website provided no other information about the Psalter. I will assume that the Psalter was made with vellum (or some other animal skin) with ink, paint and gold leaf.

Technique:

This scroll blank was to make a simple scroll on a 3x4" scrap of pergamenta that I had lying around. As I do not have much experience with pergamenta, I challenged myself to paint something on it.

I chose the P with the horn playing lion in it as I knew it would not be too difficult to produce. I did change the colors at bit. The P is, I am assuming, gold leaf; as I do not have the experience with gold leaf, I picked a dark red for the letter.

The lion (which I had thought looked more like a bear) I painted brown. I used a very watered down base coat all over, with three layers over each area; each layer thicker and thus, darker, than the previous one. I worked along the idea that the light source was coming from the upper left-hand corner of the page. Once the paint was dry, I inked the outlines and added the white work.

I decided to do something more complicated than a plain background: I chose to surround the lion with diapering. I picked dark blue and gold as my two colors; the blue to contrast with the red of the letter and the gold to give it some shine. Once the paint had dried, I outlined the squares in black ink and painted in the white lines. One the white had dried, I used my pen to place a black dot in the center of each intersection.

I used gouache: Reeves for colors and Winsor Newton for the gold. I went heavy on the gold to give it some texture. For the lion I used a very watered down base coat all over, with three layers over each area; each layer thicker and thus, darker, than the previous one. Once the paint was dry, I added the white work. I have found that with the Reeves gouache, the added white really makes the paint pop, especially the dark paints. I applied the paint so that if the virtual light source came from the upper, left-hand corner of the page, the darkest shades would fall into the right most corners, producing shadows. For the letter, I used a solid coat of red.

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Observations from 2015:

Correction: since I made the documentation, The Morgan Library & Museum has changed their website and has added some detail about the manuscript: it was printed on vellum.

The scroll did not win in its category (obviously: AEthelmearc has a metric ton of better scribes than myself) but I did receive a token from Her Majesty and one from the Kingdom A&S officers. And, fore more importantly, I was given some really nice comments. Mistress Matilda said that my "diapering is delicate and sparkly." Mistress Roberta gave me some advice on pergamenta and Mistress Alicia gave me some advice on the diapering.

The whole point of entering these high scale A&S competitions isn't just to win, but to get blind comments from judges who should know what they are looking at. Comments that can help in improving one's work. Guided by the comments I received, I would like to re-do this image, only larger and with a more complicated diapering. I think that I will make the lion/bear a lighter color so that it till stand out from the diapering better.

Since I posted this piece on my flikr page and today, it has attracted 752 views; more than any other scroll I have posted. I don't know why. This was done on, literally, a scrap of pergamenta that I had left over from testing out invisible ink. I did the initial just to see how it would look on the material: I normally work on Arches cotton paper. I had only entered in the competition because of how many views it had received.