Queen's Champion for Sonja III

Technical Information

Size: 11 x 14 inches

Reference: Visconti hours folio LF1 (A bishop addresses the faithful)

Media: Black Stonehenge paper, cold pressed

Colors: Winsor and Newton Gouaches Permanent White, Zinc White, Lamp black, Brilliant Green, Light Purple, Cadmium Yellow Pale, Ultrmarine, Cerulean Blue, Spectrum Red, Lake Orange.

Nib: Brausse 2.5 mm

Ink: Coliro Tibet Gold

Gilding: Patent Gold leaf over Miniatum Ink

Is always an honor for me to make scrolls for the crown, but this one holds a special place in my heart. I had recently started back with C&I after a long pause and I was still tasting the waters on how my skills were in this area. Deciding to make a black scroll with a lot of gold work was a leap of faith because I did end making it in a little more than a week. It was a big learning experience and a lesson on how to handle frustration and how to let go of your feelings when you are working on something that has a deadline.

HRM Sonja wanted a scroll with bright colors and a lot of shine and I've always been in love of black scrolls so I proposed the idea of using a bit of creative license to turn a folio of the Visconti Hours into a black scroll to make everything shine.

The first step was to obtain the black media. I did not have black parchment on the desired size, so I decided to try to make black pergamenta dyeing some that I had with india ink. To say it was a disaster is putting it lightly. I knew that pergamenata does not like humidity so I took a plywood piece and I stapled the pergamenata to it. Then with a stencil sponge I started painting the pergamenata using as little ink as possible without losing coverage and color and it started to curl and buckle inmediatly, even with the staples. When I finished painting it, I put weight over it doing my best to speadt it evenly and let it rest for a week or so. This was done in November so the air was very humid and I needed the pergamenta to dry flat. After a week had passed I lifted the weights, removed the staples and the pergamenata curled back up like a spring. I decided to not give up and assumed that if I painted the other side the second curl would counter the first one and make the media even, so I repeated the process with the under side and let it dry another week.

When I deemed it dry enough, removed the weights and staples. Now I had a black pergamenata with the texture of bacon. Curly all over and completely irregular.

Given that the weather conditions would not change anytime soon, it was time to switch gears and decided to just buy some cold pressed black stonehenge paper.

Drafting and Layout

The design I had chosen was quite busy, although not extremely complicated. The border is 1 3/8 inches wide, and the design is 3/4 in. wide. I did the drawing with a white mechanical pencil that is usually used for quilting, but it definitely saved my sanity because trying to do these with white transfer paper would have been a challenge that I did not had the time for.

With the drawing finished, I got to pick hand and nib. The Visconti hours was written in a variant of textura quadratta that is called rotunda that has softer lines and is slightly more open.

Ansteorra uses specific texts for our kingdom championship scrolls, so thanfully I did not have to worry about that. It also made the job of picking the nib easier as I only had to take the text into Word, frame it into a textbox of the size I needed and choose a font that looked similar to the rotunda hand. This gave me an approximate size of the letters and from that I tried different nibs until I found the closest one. It ended being a Brausse 2.5 mm, and finally I could draw the writing lines.

Now I was ready to start writing, but I needed to pick the ink first.

I had two options: Gilding or using Coliro gold paints as ink. I did not feel brave enough to do gilded calligraphy, so I tried my Coliro golds.

Because gold paint is a mica suspension, I decided to try first mixing it with a tiny amount of red paint so the gold does not sit directly on the black background, but I could not get it to saturate as much as I wanted and it kept looking faded.

Then I tried using the gold directly from the pan, using just enough water to get it to a slighly runny consistency and that yielded better results. A nice dense gold paint that wrote with no big problems and had a pretty shine to it.

Calligraphy

The calligraphy was a big challenge. I had to take a month break from this project and when I came back to it I could not get the nib to work like the tests. The paint would either not flow or just blotch while I was writing even as I cleaned the nib multiple times and made the paint more diluted.

I scratched the paper multiple times trying to get the ink to flow, which clogged the nib and just made things worse. Many of the letters lost definition because of superficial tension when I got too much ink but thankfully things fixed mostly by themselves as the ink dried. Is still far from my best best work, but I got it done

Now looking back I think the problem was that the paint was drying on the nib and was clogging it. Instead of just cleaning it I should have washed the nib every time I needed to add more ink to ensure that no dry mica was making problems. That would have been a lot more work because the reservoir of Brausse nibs is small and paint is denser than ink, so I have to reload it very often. But it would have saved me a lot of frustration tears .

Gilding

For the gilding I decided to use Miniatum ink as sizing and patent gold leaf. In previous projects I had used Instacoll as base and I found it very difficult to work with for small areas.

On the other hand, Miniatum ink behaved just as I needed. Because is very runny I could use a small paintbrush to apply it to all the vinework with no problems and it took long enough to dry that I could do a single side of the frame at a very slow pace before I needed to apply the gold.

The most difficult part here was to apply the sizing to the lines of the border in an even, straight way. leaving enough space between them so they could be seen as separate bands and not a solid one.

When applying the gold leaf to the sizing, I made sure to cut the sheets in stripes as wide as the border to minimize the waste of gold, and would burnish with a smooth agate stone through the glassene paper that is the backing of the leaf.

Because the Miniatum ink is so thin, the texture of the paper showed through so I could not achieve the mirror finish that is expected on this goldwork. For the next time, I'll make sure to apply 2 or more layers of it to achieve a smooth surface that can be burnished and tooled as needed.

Priming Illumination

When I started to paint the flats, I noticed that the color was muted and dull overthe black background. I took a step back and not happy with the results I decided to prime all the areas that would be painted with a layer of permanent white.

Permanent white is recommended for white work, or for painting pure white areas that are going to be seen because is a pigment that is very colorfast. For mixing colors is recommended we use Zinc white instead. I decided to go against convention and use Permanent white instead of Zinc for the priming because I wanted the white to not mix with the colors when I applied them.

I also used this layer to give the illumination some volume and dimension using the brushes to make some texture and flow in the petals of the flowers trying to use a single (two at most) brush stroke per petal. It was a very nice exercise in brush control because it required very precise work without being too stressful because it was going to be covered with color later.

Flat and background colors

For the base colors of the scroll I did the following mixes

Cerulean Blue + Zinc White + Ultrmarine (1:1:0.5)
Vibrant Green + Cadmium Yellow Pale + Ultrmarine (1:0.5:0.5)
Lake Orange + Cadmium Yellow Pale + Spectrum Red (1:0.5:0.5)
Light Purple + Zinc White (1:1)
Spectrum Red + Zinc White (1:1)

When painting I followed the textures that I had done while putting the white primer, but this layer was denser because I wanted even coverage, so the textures are not as noticeable as on the white.

For the diapering on the versal, I had to use a smaller brush than the rest, because the gouache was overflowing the gilding. Diapering with gold leaf is something I need to practice in the future, because all the process was quite frustrating. I wanted to keep the level of detail from the draft and I lost some of it doing the final version.

Shading

This was another challenging step. It was the first time doing any kind of shading on a scroll and while I know the theory on how to do it, actually doing it is another thing. Shades should be done with a light source on the top left corner of the scroll, but the ones here are almost random.

For the colors of the shading I used:

Light Purple
Flat blue + Ultramarine
Flat green + Ultramarine
Lake Orange
Spectrum Red

I applied the shades trying to be consistent within each element at the least. For the letters and versal I just outlined the elements to give them some detail.

Highlights (white work)

I did the highlights simply adding touches of permanent white opposing to the shaded areas. Originally I wanted to do colored highlights, using a lighter color than the flats to give a more subtle lightning, but another scribe (Ian the Green) advised me that pure white lights would look more striking, specially against a black background so I decided to follow his advice.

Badges and finishing touches

The last things I did were the personal badge of the Queen and the Queen's rose.

They were done using Coliro Arabic Gold and gouaches Lamp lack, Silver and Vibrant green.

These should have been done with gold leaf instead of gold paint, but I'm not still comfortable gilding to the amount of detail needed to do the Queen's rose. The 10 pointed star of the center has always given me a lot of problem when gilding so this time I decided ti play it safe and go for the paint.

For the cleanup I merely erased the lines in blank spaces and dabbed the gold smudges on the calligraphy with a mix of lamp black and zing white, roughly 2:1

Conclusions and Lessons

I had very high expectations for this project, and they were mostly met. I did learn that I need to consider mote time when doing gold calligraphy for the constant cleanup to get a dense color and sharp lines that this kind of fonts requires. I also need to practice my shading.

For the next time I do gilding, I should use 2 or 3 layers of miniatum ink instead of only one. This not only will give it more dimension but it will also mask the texture of the paper and will allow me to get a mirror like finish.

For now I think I will take a break from black scrolls until I have some more practice on the calligraphy, to be more comfortable with my writing with gold paints before attempting it again.

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