By Baroness Jervisa Wainwright, OP
An Intermediate scribe should have the following basic skills:
Use of materials
A practiced knowledge of how to lay out a page
How to do basic calligraphy
Have had some experience making scrolls
To Become an Active Scribe
You should, if you desire to make scrolls for the Kingdom, have the Middle Kingdom Scribes Handbook and have contacted the Pentamere Signet.
I recommend, whether if you have or haven’t contacted the regional signet yet, that you make or have photocopied examples of your work to show your skill level.
Your Personal Library
There are many online resources and every day more and more collections of medieval manuscripts and documents are being digitized and made available online. Digital bookmarks will make life much easier.
I find that starting a library of Illumination and Calligraphy books to be very helpful. Learning becomes much easier when you can put your hands on a source to practice from. You can study the paintings of a particular style and see the ways different masters chose to illustrate them.
Once you have experience, you can pick and choose the subjects you are more interested in. The books can run from a few dollars to quite expensive. A good library takes many years and a lot of thought to put together. Don’t forget to ask questions about what books other people have in their libraries.
Illumination
Once you start your library (online or on a bookshelf), you have the resources to try new art styles. At this point you should have had enough practice with simple designs to go on to something a little more involved. Don’t be afraid to try something a little difficult. No one is perfect at the beginning. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t turn out the way you want. Just think of it as not quite having the necessary skills yet. If you are having a difficult time with a new style, put it away and try something else for a while and come back to it later. You’ll be surprised how easy it becomes all of a sudden. I still do that when I haven’t done an intricate one in a long time. I call those, in between scrolls, “confidence builders”.
Most people start out making scrolls on 11”x14” sheets of paper. It is very good when you’re starting. What I suggest, when your confident enough to try, is to work a little smaller. Try illuminating on 8½”x 11” or 8”x10” pages. Once you become used to working this way, go crazy and do some really small paintings. Some of the strewn borders I like to do are around 4”x6” and sometimes smaller. Just proceed at your own pace.
Another thing you may wish to try is using period pigments. The easiest one to make is lamp black. This is made by placing either a ceramic or brass bowl just over a candle flame and collecting the soot from it. I do not recommend using soot from an oil lamp, because the soot would be too oily and is incompatible with the other water based pigments.
As long as I’ve told you how to make lamp black, I should at least have the decency to tell you what you should mix with it to bind to your page. You can either use Gum Arabic or you can make Glair. Glair is made by breaking open an egg and separating the white from the yolk. The white is what you want to use. Beat the egg white until stiff peaks from and your arm feels like it’s about to fall off and then beat it some more. Cover it and leave it out for a few hours. What this will do is separate the liquid from the foam. The liquid is what you want. Here comes the good news and the bad news. The bad news is that it will stink. The good news is that it will develop to a certain level and it won’t get any worse and you will get used to it. Once you’ve let it sit a while you can carefully pour the glair into cleaned 35mm film canisters or any container that will seal and that light can’t penetrate.
Congratulations! You’ve made your first batch of glair. To make paint, you can use the blunt end of your brush to gather some of your lamp black and put it on your pallet and taking the blunt end of your brush again, try to get a nearly equal amount of glair. Blend them together add enough water to bring it to the right consistency and you’re ready to rock-and-roll.
Learning gold leafing is best done one-on-one and with as much time as possible to become familiar with the process.
Calligraphy
On the subject of calligraphy, there is no rule that says that it is only done in black ink. In my years of experience I have found that the old Masters were fond of using color in the texts as well. For example: in one Italian text, I found that the Master would use gold ink on one line and blue on the next, alternating throughout the text. My favorite is a discovery I made while looking at a Celtic piece. It only had two lines, one was inked in red and the other was in green. Almost every since then I will alternate red, green, and black on my Celtic scrolls.
The colored inks I use are just my paints thinned down enough to flow through my nibs. A word of caution; you may need to clean your nibs more often because the paint will clog the points after a little while. The extra cleaning you have to do is worth the results.
One more thing, on the subject of nibs, I recommend that if you do choose to work on smaller pages that you purchase and practice with smaller nibs. I have some that range from 1 1/2mm to 1/2 mm. On occasion I have resorted to using a crow quill pen.
I hope that this will help guide you in your study. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I’ve never met anyone yet who wasn’t willing to take time and share information.