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I've had a think.
2005-02-03 05:15 pmWalking home from campus just now (it takes half an hour and it was snowing, it was lovely lovely lovely) I got to thinking. There is not much else to do while you are walking. Yesterday I called my sister-in-law back as I had missed a call from her that morning.
Aaanyway, walking I got to pondering, and my thoughts went to my illumination skillz (not really skills, but more like I got... I need to stop doing these ellipses, honestly).
So, I think I need to take the next step up, going by period originals, but not copying them exactly. Not that any of my work so far has been anywhere near an exact copy of an original, but that is what I have aspired to. I am not too terribly bothered about using only period materials, parchment, home-ground pigments and self-mixed paints etc. That is not such a big concern for me right now, because, frankly the first priority for me in the illumination and calligraphy business is that I want to be able to produce beautiful artwork with the level of detail and "accuracy" as I can.
Painting needs practice, first of all it needs a sense of colour, of colour combinations and of technique. Secondly it needs an eye for design. I'm mostly only interested in doing SCA award scrolls because I utterly suck at doing things like this without a very specific goal in mind. This means the design must involve an awareness of text.
To make a lovely scroll that is not in itself anachronistic, i.e. as a whole belongs to the same era, you need to have a fairly deep understanding of what was done at that time, which elements existed and how they can be put together.
These sort of thoughts are a bit scary to me, because being able to reach that points will mean some serious dedicated research. Working on my last scroll from the third quarter of the 14th Century it is a style which I have done before, acanthus leaves and vines. The colours were also fairly familiar, although a bit more pastel than what I've done before. During the detailing I just felt rushed and stressed, but once I got down to painting I realized that my hand remembered the shapes. Outlining a leaf in pencil was much more difficult to do gracefully, while with a brush the lines came naturally. That might just be because of the very different nature of a stick of lead compared to a flexible brush, but it was not just at that level that I was on familiar ground.
This is actually what eventually prompted this little reverie - I can look at my latest scroll and point out the elements that go to make it up, and see how they have been used and re-used. I would not say that my knowledge about this sort of style is exhaustive by -any- means, but if I decide for myself to concentrate on this style from now on until I can produce an original scroll in this style, comprised of the right sort of elements, the correct colours and looking like it were copied from a medieval source, I think I will have taken that next step.
There are obvious delights in this, but also equally obvious drawbacks.
+ I'll be able to say that I -know- this style of illuminiation, and hopefully be good at it
+ I will have taken the next step
+ I might even enter something A&S:y from it (though specifically A&S competitions don't really attract me that much)
+ I might finally, after two years, hold a Tuesday shire-meeting lecture on a subject where I feel I know something.
- Research hours must be put in
- One style might bore me to bits and I'll stop doing it altogether
- Will I only produce this style for any awards I'm asked to do a scroll for?
- I must find enough period originals to go off of to draw sensible conclusions.
- What if I eventually find the style to be ugly, clunky and yuck in the end?
So you see, it's not all that simple. I want to make cooler texts as well for AoAs for example. There are suggested scroll texts online, but most all of them are in English, which is nice, but I need Swedish exemplars because, frankly, I'm Nordmarkian and we do scrolls in Swedish. I could just translate the ones I find, they're translated from Latin already, but yanno, those research hours.
Aaanyway, walking I got to pondering, and my thoughts went to my illumination skillz (not really skills, but more like I got... I need to stop doing these ellipses, honestly).
So, I think I need to take the next step up, going by period originals, but not copying them exactly. Not that any of my work so far has been anywhere near an exact copy of an original, but that is what I have aspired to. I am not too terribly bothered about using only period materials, parchment, home-ground pigments and self-mixed paints etc. That is not such a big concern for me right now, because, frankly the first priority for me in the illumination and calligraphy business is that I want to be able to produce beautiful artwork with the level of detail and "accuracy" as I can.
Painting needs practice, first of all it needs a sense of colour, of colour combinations and of technique. Secondly it needs an eye for design. I'm mostly only interested in doing SCA award scrolls because I utterly suck at doing things like this without a very specific goal in mind. This means the design must involve an awareness of text.
To make a lovely scroll that is not in itself anachronistic, i.e. as a whole belongs to the same era, you need to have a fairly deep understanding of what was done at that time, which elements existed and how they can be put together.
These sort of thoughts are a bit scary to me, because being able to reach that points will mean some serious dedicated research. Working on my last scroll from the third quarter of the 14th Century it is a style which I have done before, acanthus leaves and vines. The colours were also fairly familiar, although a bit more pastel than what I've done before. During the detailing I just felt rushed and stressed, but once I got down to painting I realized that my hand remembered the shapes. Outlining a leaf in pencil was much more difficult to do gracefully, while with a brush the lines came naturally. That might just be because of the very different nature of a stick of lead compared to a flexible brush, but it was not just at that level that I was on familiar ground.
This is actually what eventually prompted this little reverie - I can look at my latest scroll and point out the elements that go to make it up, and see how they have been used and re-used. I would not say that my knowledge about this sort of style is exhaustive by -any- means, but if I decide for myself to concentrate on this style from now on until I can produce an original scroll in this style, comprised of the right sort of elements, the correct colours and looking like it were copied from a medieval source, I think I will have taken that next step.
There are obvious delights in this, but also equally obvious drawbacks.
+ I'll be able to say that I -know- this style of illuminiation, and hopefully be good at it
+ I will have taken the next step
+ I might even enter something A&S:y from it (though specifically A&S competitions don't really attract me that much)
+ I might finally, after two years, hold a Tuesday shire-meeting lecture on a subject where I feel I know something.
- Research hours must be put in
- One style might bore me to bits and I'll stop doing it altogether
- Will I only produce this style for any awards I'm asked to do a scroll for?
- I must find enough period originals to go off of to draw sensible conclusions.
- What if I eventually find the style to be ugly, clunky and yuck in the end?
So you see, it's not all that simple. I want to make cooler texts as well for AoAs for example. There are suggested scroll texts online, but most all of them are in English, which is nice, but I need Swedish exemplars because, frankly, I'm Nordmarkian and we do scrolls in Swedish. I could just translate the ones I find, they're translated from Latin already, but yanno, those research hours.
