I began the illumination at Arts in April, during my intro to illumination class; I had the border printed out, and it seemed nice and simple, and a good way to illustrate various techniques. I continued using it for the same purpose for my intro to illumination class at Double Wars. Then a few days later, Margaretha came over for C&I night and was looking for advice on gilding, so I took the opportunity to put down all the size and then, rather than deal with gold that night, painted in all the black outlining. It started turning out really nice, so I decided then to use it for Thomas's Lindquistringes, rather than trying to start a completely new design from scratch in the remaining time I had left. So two nights later, Jun. 1, I returned and did all the gilding -- or at least, I put gold over all the size, and left the matter of cleaning up the edges and removing the extra bits for another night. That other night was Jun. 5, when I discovered a nifty trick of running my finger very lightly over all the gilded parts, which did remarkably well of cleaning up the edges and removing the extra bits. Then I went in to painting the inside of the initial, which I had previously forgotten to sketch when I was sketching everything else. I managed to get that, and a little bit of the whitework done before needed to turn my attention to other things.
I put down the size for gilding the inner part of the initial the evening of Jun. 6, and during Gwen's nap on Jun. 8, I gilding that, finished, the whitework, and re-went over all the outlines in black. Only thing left, now, writing the text and doing the calligraphy!
Joel offered to watch Gwen some on Jun. 9, which allowed me to get the lines ruled out and the text written. The text reads:
Drachenwaldenses reges, nominaliter Leifus et Morigana, ad Thomam Flandrensis de Kelsale, salutationem, gratiam, et benedic tionem. Agnitionis muni quod prebuisti nobis, offerimus ideo tibi admissionem in nostris ordo nis anuli lindquiste, qui confert jus ostendere insigne ordonis, anulus factus draconi aurei sine pennis habentis ornamentum rubrum. Ut usus commune: The drachenwaldish rulers, Leif and Morrigan by name, to Thomas abovementioned, salutations, goodwill and greetings. In recognition of the service which you have rendered unto us, we therefore offer unto you admission in our Order of the Lindquistrin ges, which confers the right to bear the badge of the order, a ring formed of a wingless dragon or maintaining a gem gules.
Datum apud Castrum Bolton praeter Depe dene supra Wychewood, xiiij kal. junii, anno societatis xlix. Teste huius Arianuia Bona nostra scriptrix fecit hos presentes, signatos Leifo regi, Morigane regine.
It took just under two hours to do all the calligraphy, along with all the internal capitals and flourishes, interrupted only three times by a small child who recognize the power of the toilet as a "get out of bed free" card. The internal decorated initials are drawn from BL MS Egerton 751 f. 13v.
And I was just about ready to wrap up shop for the night...and realized I'd forgotten to put the green bits around the golden balls. Out come the paints and brushes again... V. pleased with the result; the green made the border pop, quite a bit more than I would've thought on the basis of my exemplar.
Here are some close-up details:
© 2014, Sara L. Uckelman.
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