Cape Cottages

Fisherman's cottages, Western Cape. Pen and watercolor, 5 x 7 inches:

Flying Things

Studies of marabous:

And a helicopter:

Pen and watercolor on printer paper.

And a few more

Some more random sketches in ballpoint pen and watercolor, on printer paper:

A few random sketches

Some sketches in watercolor on printer paper (which works perfectly fine for watercolor sketching, if you don't mind a bit of warping and they don't have to last into geological time):

Loosely copied after an original by Pieter van der Westhuizen (1931 - 2008); I went straight into the watercolor without making any sort of preliminary sketch, so it's not exactly accurate. But it forced me to loosen up a bit, which was partly the point.

And a similarly loose copy after an oil by Maggie Laubser (1886 - 1973), whose work I admire:

Sketched from various reference photos; I first made the sketches in ballpoint pen and then filled them in with a few washes of color:

A Medieval project (6)

After last week's decoration of the manuscript, all that remains is to bind it. Book binding dates from around the first century C.E., and started out in rather simple fashion, evolving over the centuries into more elaborate and sophisticated forms. However, even modern hardcover books are bound in ways not all that different from the late Middle Ages.

This picture show relatively basic medieval book binding, in which quires are stitched together and to the cover:

In this example, the binding is more advanced (note the coloured stitching around the end):

Book covers could include clasps to hold the book closed:

Covers ranged from fairly plain to very elaborate:

For my own manuscript I decided to keep it as simple as possible, because I did not have suitable equipment at hand. I had neither thread nor needle, so I decided to use relatively thick twine (which is perhaps more authentically medieval anyway!). 

I wanted to stitch the quires together using this sort of cross-stitch technique:

Lacking a needle, I used a wooden skewer to punch holes in the backs of the quires, and then threaded the twine through by hand:

It took some doing, and the result was inevitably not too neat. For the cover I followed a procedure based on that followed in some early medieval Coptic codices, which is to simply glue the cover to the outer pages of the manuscript in this way:

I made a simple cover from cardboard, then tightened up my cross stitching and glued the cover on:

Not the most sophisticated of books, but I learned quite a bit in the whole process.

Other parts in this series:

Part 1: Making fake parchment

Part 2: Preparing the quires

Part 3: Preparing the parchment for writing

Part 4: Ductus, angle and weight

Part 5: Copying and decoration

A Medieval project (5)

In the previous week we just practiced a bit of writing; for this week, students were supposed to write and decorate a text. We only had to write one or two pages, but I didn't like the idea of ending up with a mostly empty manuscript, so I was determined to copy out and illustrate my entire chosen text, namely the poem The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson (1809 - 1892).

We were supposed to base our decorations on actual medieval manuscripts, but were also given some freedom to improvise, so I did a bit of both - some of my pages are more in the style of medieval work, while others are decidedly modern. I looked at some actual manuscripts to see how some specific decorations, that I wanted to try out, were done.

This one gives one a sense of the style of illustration used, as well as the elaborate stylized leaf pattern decoration (known as rinceau) used in the margin:

Calendar from a Book of Hours, in Latin, on vellum [French Flanders (perhaps region of Binche or Mauberge), c.1450]

This one shows several things: more rinceau design, a decorated initial and some marginal drolleries. These were bizarre, humourous and sometimes blatantly obscene pictures found in the margins of many medieval book pages:

Crucifixion Scene from a French Book of Hours (c 1470) 133x93mm

Here a historiated initial, i.e. an initial with a picture in it. In this case it is an inhabited initial, where the picture is a human or animal:

Illuminated Manuscript, Book of Hours, St George, Walters Manuscript W168

This page shows another form of border decoration, where pictures are more realistic and less stylized:

The poem I copied consists of nineteen verses of nine lines each, and thus, using one page per verse, I could keep pretty much the same layout for every page. Every page contains a decorated initial, and a rubricated one (where an initial is written in a different colour for emphasis - traditionally red was used, but I used other colours as well). I also included an illustration on most pages, and all the pages contain border decorations, some fairly medieval in style, others more modern.

I used modern materials such as watercolour and acrylic paints, and modern ink, but I used a fairly old-fashioned dip pen for writing. I am not at all versed in calligraphy so I just used a "normal" handwriting, but tried to keep it neat and legible.

Here then are my illuminated pages (click on the pictures for the full-sized view), with comments on some of them:

Medieval scribes often used gold leaf for illumination. Unlike medieval scribes, I am not rolling in money, so I used gold craft paint instead. Unfortunately one cannot see the glitter in these photos. In the image below, the decorated initial has quite a bit of gold in it, but it comes across as light brown in the photo. Same thing happened with all the other pages where I used the gold paint:

In this page, and one of the others, I tried some Celtic knot designs in the margin. These were popular as decorations in some medieval books. Unfortunately, they take ages to do, so I had to limit them:

This page contains a historiated initial: the Lady of Shalott makes an appearance in the decorated letter O. The reapers were roughly copied from an original painting by Maggie Laubser (1886 - 1973):

The plain, abstract design behind the weaving lady was often used in medieval manuscripts. Also, I paid no attention to proper perspective, because that is what medieval artists would have done:

The stylized leaf designs here are only vaguely based on medieval examples; I made more authentic-looking ones in other pages. 

The border decoration here is an anachronism; tomatoes were unknown in medieval Europe. I did try to get the characters' clothes to look more or less medieval:

The blue colour in the text area is an artifact introduced by the camera, that I couldn't work out how to remove; the original page is white. Also, the darker stars are actually done with gold paint, but one would never guess in this reproduction:

In the poem, several pages are devoted to the appearance of the knight; I didn't want to draw the same character over and over, so I stuck to decorations for some pages, in this case trying my hand at somewhat more authentic-looking rinceau:

The knight on a snail in the left margin is my attempt at a drollery:

The illustration here was roughly copied from the famous original on the theme of the Lady of Shalott, by John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917):

In the pages above and below my border designs are decidedly un-medieval. But the scroll in the illustration below is not: in the days before speech bubbles, such scrolls were often used to indicate what people were saying:

As in the case of Sir Lancelot, several stanzas of the poem are about the lady floating downriver, so instead of drawing the same picture over and over, I stuck to decorative designs:

And finally, the end, with an illustration that is not exactly medieval in style - I actually found it rather difficult to imitate the medieval style, and developed a new respect for forgers!

Other posts in this series:

Part 1: Making the parchment

Part 2: Creating quires

Part 3: Preparing the parchment for writing

Part 4: Ductus, angle and weight

Part 6: Binding

A Medieval project (4)

In the previous part of this project, I worked on the page layout of my fake parchment. For the next part, the instructor wanted students to experiment with various aspects of writing, in preparation for writing the manuscript. In particular, three aspects of writing will be investigated, namely ductus, angle and weight.

1. With ductus is meant the number and direction of pen strokes, as well as the order in which they are made.There are four basic strokes that make up letters: vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved. With modern ballpoint pens, we tend to forget about ductus, because with these pens, it often does not matter that much - they give a line of uniform appearance, irrespective of how the pen is pulled or pushed on the writing surface.

Individuals will nevertheless develop their own way of doing it. I seem to remember being taught this in primary school as well, though I can't be too sure, as my older brother taught me to read and write before I went to school, and so I never paid much attention in those classes! Nowadays, at least here in South Africa, many schools seem not to put much emphasis anymore on how a pen should be held and how the pen strokes should be made.

As noted above, with ballpoint pens it does not matter as much as with older writing implements such as fountain pens or dip pens, as we shall shortly see.

In the illustration below I indicate the ductus of some letters made with two different implements. The top line shows the basic strokes. In the second line, I indicate the direction and order in which strokes were made. This applies to my own handwriting, and will not be universal with all people.

In the third line I continued the analysis, this time comparing a ballpoint pen with a dip pen. With the ballpoint letters, one hardly needs to indicate ductus, because with a ballpoint the letters can really be formed with a single, continuous stroke. With a dip pen, on the other hand, you rapidly run into trouble if you try to use it in the same way as a ballpoint, because the dip pen nib cannot readily be pushed forward; all strokes must be made with a pulling motion. With the letters in ballpoint, I could use a single motion and just change direction, without having to lift the pen, whereas with the dip pen I had to make separate pen strokes, as indicated.

2. The writing angle refers to the angle at which a pen's nib is held with respect to the horizontal or vertical. As with ductus, in the case of a ballpoint pen it makes no difference, and indeed, because of the symmetrical shape of the ballpoint nib the term doesn't even make much sense when talking about writing done in ballpoint.

With dip pens of the sort used during the Middle Ages, it makes quite a difference, as can be seen in the diagram below. Changing the angle at which the nib is held creates quite different letter shapes. This is particularly noticeable when using  broad nib. With thinner nibs the difference is not so apparent.

3. With weight is meant the difference in width between the thinnest and thickest strokes in a script. Scripts where there is no difference or the difference is small is referred to as light scripts, whereas script where the difference is big are considered to be heavy scripts. As can be seen in the diagram, the type of pen used makes a big difference. Ballpoint pens give an even and very light script. In cursive writing with a ballpoint, a slight heaviness can enter if, for example, less pressure is used on upstrokes than downstrokes (as is taught in some schools), so that downstrokes will be slightly broader. However, it hardly noticeable.

With dip pens with flat nibs, the writing is heavier the broader the nib, as can be clearly seen below, despite the fact that I have no experience in writing with these pens and am therefore not exactly skilled at it.

Only one thing remains before I can start to write my manuscript, and that is to choose a text to copy. I decided on Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shalott, which has a medieval theme even though it doesn't date from medieval times. I am going to attempt to copy out and illuminate the entire poem. This will be a project for another post.

Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: Making the parchment

Part 2: Creating quires

Part 3: Preparing the parchment for writing

Part 5: Copying and decoration

Part 6: Binding