Making an Illuminated Award

by Lady Elen Alswyth of Eriskay

In the East Kingdom of the SCA, those who have demonstrated excellence in the Arts may be inducted into the Order of the Maunche. The recipient of this particular award specializes in the Italian Renaissance, and has expressed an admiration for the Italian whitevine style.

The Italian whitevine style of illustration is normally combined with Humanist calligraphy, and would be most appropriate. Unfortunately, I've never done this style before!

So my first task was to find some examples. I found a nice manuscript in an exhibit catalog, so I traced that. This is a good way to get the feel for the flow of the artwork. As it happens, I decided against that example, and searched further.

A good library is indispensible for scribe work. I searched:

Iluminated Manuscripts: The Book Before Gutenberg by Giulia Bologna
A History of Illuminated Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel
Illuminated Manuscripts by Janice Anderson

I finally found a vine interlacing I liked, and adapted it for a different initial letter and a different foliage type. I experimented coloring it in with colored pencils, until I found a color scheme I liked. Finally, I was ready to start on the award itself.

Initial sepia drawing	1. Using sepia ink, I drew the design on Pergamanata vegetable vellum paper.
Gold leaf added.JPG	2. Gold leaf has to be applied before anything else, or else you will have gold leaf fragments stuck all over the other paint. Ask me how I know. First a couple of layers of gesso (in this case, Permacol) are laid down. When the gesso is dry, the gold leaf is laid on top and burnished. Finally, a piece of silk is used to polish the gold.
White, red, and green added	3. Here I've laid in some color. I started by running white gouache along the white vines.I shaded these with watered-down sepia ink, and added the scintillation to the stars. Next I filled in the red areas, followed by the green areas. At this point it's beginning to look like Christmas, but that will change.
Now the blue	4. With the addition of blue, all the colors start to pop.
So far, so good!	Time to take a break. It's looking so pretty that I'm scared to add the calligraphy. What if I mess it up? So off to the books; I find some calligraphy examples I like and make an exemplar. Then I try writing out the text a couple of times, first on graph paper, and then on one of the sketches I had made earlier, so that the word spacing will be OK with the border.
CoM-5.JPG	5. Calligraphy added. On the previous picture of my desk, you can see part of a plexiglass "bridge" that I used to keep my hand off of the paper. I also covered the part below the line I was working on with a blank sheet of paper. I mixed a little sepia into my india ink to soften the black a little; that seemed to work a little better with this style of illustration.
Finished!	6. A final touch -- this style typically had little white dots, usually grouped in threes, on the blue and red colored backgrounds. Gold-colored gouache dots were put on the green areas. Lastly a bit of sepia was used to touch up the vine interlacing, That's it! Total time, about 30 hours.