This assignment, received on a Wednesday afternoon, had a short deadline. It needed to be ready by Saturday afternoon. Since I was already on The Met’s website researching another scroll with the same deadline, I searched the same archive and found a pair of 16th century British gloves with a lovely pattern embroidered on the cuffs.
There was not enough time for me to get this image cleaned up in Photoshop for a printed template to take to the light table, so I made do by turning the brightness on my tablet up to full gain and carefully tracing the outline of the right glove while trying not to let my fingers touch the screen and disturb the image underneath. This only worked for me because the amount of tracing needed was minimal. Once I had the rough shape, I sketched in a thumb and the embroidered cuff by hand.
Satisfied, I inked it with a micron pen and gilded the embroidery.
When my cats catch wind that I’m doing scroll work at the dining room table, they are invariably all up in my business, so I have to be very conscious of what I put on the table to minimize the appearance of cat toys.
Even then I still have to periodically admonish Ozzy to keep his nose off the page. He’s never tried to lick it and I stick to non-toxic pigments anyway, but an ill-timed sneeze would be disastrous.
In retrospect, it would have been easier to whitewash the glove before doing the gold instead of having to carefully work around it, but I didn’t know I wanted to whitewash it until after the gold was on. As with the other scroll I was working on at the same time, I felt that this one also needed more gold, so I traced a letter out of the Illuminated Letters Sketchbook.
And, also as with the other scroll, the illuminated letter needed some additional punch after the calligraphy was added.
Materials: Tablet, 8″x10″ pergamenata, ruler, Ames lettering guide, pencil, eraser, 01 micron pen, metal scraper, Finetec Tibet gold paint, Winsor & Newton gouache, Princeton heritage 2/0 round paint brush, Speedball Super Black ink, dip pen