I went over the rough of the illumination with colour pencils. The colours alternate in many places and I didn't want to be painting, and suddenly discover I was stuck with going "blue, blue" because I've changed the design a bit.

Here's just the top of it - I couldn't be bothered scanning it 4 times again, and then patching them together.


I'm not quite decided on how to decorate the illuminated letter. I'm not going to do a historiated letter, as per the original, coz I can't draw people and don't want to make a nieve attempt and have it look less good than it might if I use a technique I'm familiar with.
So I'm thinking diapering.

The other thing I haven't done is the line endings. I wanted to wait until I had done the final piece, to see exactly what spaces I ended up with.

I have done the writing "for real" on the Arches HP now.

I used a student grade Sumi ink.

It was a bit of a struggle - the Sumi is a bit on the thicker side, and I write so slowly with this script that that gravity wasn't helping the ink flow much. I wrote with an overloaded pen.
(my Brause LH 1.5). It does give the writing a bit of shine, and raise above the paper though.

Of course, there are lots of minor mistakes, where I could have done better. Probably doing it in one hit isn't the best idea, but I wanted to 'just do it'.

If I did it again, I'd probably do a different set of minor mistakes. Nothing than normal people would pick up, only calligraphers that know the script.

I'm up to tracing the design onto the Arches. :-) then begins the gilding! :-) I'm going to do flat gilding. I'm not good enough with gesso to do the amount of gilding required for this piece - there's a huge amount. I'll have to practise gesso on other smaller pieces - but not this baby.

I'm dissolving some gum arabic crystals in water in preparation for the gilding. I haven't used it before - I thought the lumps would be really hard to break up, but they aren't. My fingers smell all piney.

I'm going to have a problem showing progress on the piece. Sticking it in the scanner will bend the paper. It's 40 x 50 cm big, including the margins. I hope to take it to a friend with a camera occasionally.