Tag Archives: vellum

The Fully Qualified Glitterati

Another group of people eager to learn the traditional skills and techniques of mediæval illumination and miniature painting gathered in Kent, UK, in May 2021. This was a group who had planned to take this course in 2020 but the pandemic got in the way, so everyone, including me, was very excited to be able actually to take the course.

Everything is provided on the course, no-one needs to bring anything with them, and it takes quite a while to ensure that all the tools and materials are clean, pencils sharpened, erasers ready to use, and there are no scratches on the burnishers. Those who have been on my courses before will recognise the wet boxes and the dry boxes!

Each participant has their work station set up for them so that all they need is ready to hand; no-one has to share tools etc and wait for someone else to finish using them. There is also plenty of space so those working don’t feel cramped.

After practising applying gold and burnishing to already laid gesso, gesso is made for participants to take home to make more illuminated miniatures, and gesso made earlier is applied to their own choice of miniature. But first everyone cuts their own quill from a swan’s feather to apply the gesso.

Vellum is prepared and the outline traced and transferred to the skin. Gesso is then laid ready for gilding.

Applying real gold leaf changes the pink gesso into what looks like solid gold.

Everyone is delighted with the magical effect, even if some gesso is a little smoother than others. Turning it in the light really does look as if the miniature is illuminated.

After practising painting their miniature everyone sets to painting their ‘proper’ one.

A great deal of concentration is required for this, and while people are busy painting, I explain about the types of skin to use, and also show and talk about the traditional pigments.

Everyone was delighted with their results and said they learned a lot. I hope they continue to do more as they were a very impressive set of illuminations. And no, most people had never done this before, and many had very little painting experience either.

Genuine comments from the course include:

It was great, relaxed but very informative. Lovely day, uninterrupted painting. Perfect. I loved it.

Excellent instructions and I loved how passionate and knowledgeable you are about your subject. I learnt loads and my confidence built up over the duration of the course. I am looking forward to trying my new-found skills at home.

Very enjoyable, very well done. I was very happy with what I managed to achieve all thanks to Patricia.

Everything was very clear and thank you for your individual support on any questions or problems. A wonderful course. Thank you so much!

Really clear instructions, explanations, etc, and brilliant being able to ask as many questions as possible. Had an amazing time, thank you. Will be definitely going home and continuing my painting. I had lost my enjoyment of painting any illuminations as I had just become frustrated not knowing what to do and the techniques needed. Thanks.

Expert teaching of intricate techniques very well explained and demonstrated. The course is very well paced. Enough time to really focus on a good painting.

Brilliant, even for a beginner with no knowledge of the craft. Best course ever – would wish to do another. Experience shines through gently. 10 out of 10.

A model example of thorough preparation, micro and macro management of a complex subject. Delightful outcome of a memorable three days. Bravissimo!

(NB, the comments don’t necessarily match the person creating the miniature!)

****One person on the course had a Dystonic tremor which affects the whole body, and also has MS which affects other parts. Painting the practice piece was done in the afternoon and the hand wasn’t so steady, but painting the best piece started in the morning and they found that ‘with so much concentration, I was hardly shaking. It feels since the course that my self confidence has taken a huge boost as well’.

So don’t think this course isn’t for you if you have no experience. Illumination involves technique, and that is what is taught. And if you, too, have a tremor or a physical challenge, you may well surprise yourself and what you can do in three days!

‘It is not yet spring …’

Most calligraphers are always on the lookout for words and texts that appeal and can be written out and interpreted. I noted these wonderful words by Edward Thomas (who for a time lived near us) early in 2020 before the resulting pandemic became so restrictive. I wrote them out in the winter of 2020 when it really did seem that any spring really was being dreamed as being ‘more wonderful and more blessed than ever was spring’.

As always, the words were addressed first. I needed to work out the length of the line of text so that I could select a size of oval that fitted. A piece of vellum of suitable size was prepared and the oval shape drawn in as a guide for the lettering. I thought that this colour green for the text would work well with the theme.

Yet again, dear Edward Thomas did not consider us as calligraphers when he wrote. How wonderful it would have been if he had thought to include some words that had ascenders that could be flourished in the top left half and at the base.

And now to the flowers. I researched photographs of spring flowers; I would have preferred to have used actual examples but I was working on this at the wrong time of year. I made sketches of where various flowers could go – it seemed sensible to have taller flowers near the top and smaller flowers nearer the base, so bluebells were in the upper part and violets, crocuses and primroses towards the lower part.

I sketched out a possible layout in coloured pencils and checked it for size of the flowers and colour balance with the lettering.

This stage was partway through the painting. The leaves on bluebells are yet to be inserted and I didn’t like the straightish line on the top of the violets on the right hand side. The primroses also needed more definition, but it’s on its way.

And this is the finished piece. The bluebells don’t look quite so isolated now they have some leaves to accompany them. The single hellebore and primroses have more definition, there are now more hellebores lower right and left, with crocuses in a bed of grass in the base.

There is always a delicate balance between text and illustration and in this instance it can rightly be said that there isn’t that much of a balance here, let alone a delicate one! The density and colour of the flowers really do outweigh the lettering which dances around trying to hold its own but not succeeding very well! However, this was an effect of the pandemic and the thought that when spring comes it really will be ‘more wonderful and more blessed than ever was spring’.

‘…With Wakened Hands …’

I really like this quotation from D H Lawrence, although I do wish that he hadn’t excluded women – many of whom have wakened hands just like men! However, these were the times and the words resonated so much with me that I wanted to write them out.

As usual, I wrote out the words just as they were and, for the last few months, I’ve been writing quite small, so I cut a swan’s quill to the equivalent of a size 5 Mitchell nib. I knew that I wanted to pop in a couple of flourishes on the top line so introduced these as I was writing the words. Having written the words out in the same script, I then read it through again to consider which phrases had particular meaning for me and wrote them out in small dancing capitals. One of the great things about being a calligrapher is that we all react to words differently, so what I choose to emphasise may not be the same as the next person. For some reason, although I love ‘with wakened hands’ I missed out the ‘with’ in the first write through and then the whole phrase in the second version! What was it about wakened hands that weren’t going through my brain?

I then photocopied the page and cut the text into strips for each line, breaking the text where it fitted my proposed design and allowing for the sense and flow of the words. The advantage of doing this is that when writing things out in rough usually I am much more relaxed and it doesn’t matter if I make a mistake as I can just write in the word or phrase again as can be seen; this means that the text isn’t tight and cramped as it may be when first writing on the prepared surface and on lines carefully measured and drawn. I marked the mid point of each line and placed them in order on a white piece of paper at about the best distance between the lines. I also numbered the lines (very important to ensure that the lines don’t get mixed up!).

I then used two L-shaped pieces of card and slid them up and down and in and out to set the margins of the piece which meant that I could cut a piece of vellum to this size and then prepared it for writing. I used a set of compasses to measure out the distance between the lines with pin pricks, and then ruled horizontal guidelines and also a vertical line indicating the centre.

I loved the green colour of oxide of chromium so I mixed up this Schmincke Calligraphy Gouache to the consistency of thin, runny cream and used a piece of magic tape that I’d taken some of the ‘tack’ off by pressing it again and again on my finger to attach the photocopied strip of the first line above where I was to write, lining up the centre point. Having the text just above where I was to write meant that it was much simpler to ensure that the words were spelled correctly and written in the right place so that the lines were centred.

So the text was written and now for the painting.

I really enjoyed painting squirrels on a recent piece so I decided to paint some more. Previously I had painted squirrels on grass. This time I thought I’d paint them in autumn on a bed of leaves, so I looked up images of red squirrels online and chose three in different poses for the top. I used a 000 Kolinsky sable brush (I prefer da Vinci brushes from Cornelissen and Son in London as they are such good quality) with watercolour and a strong magnifying glass – they were only about 10 mm tall! For the bed of leaves I used dilute light red and ochre to paint a wash, and then a darker brown to paint the leaves themselves – half of it is done in this enlargement.

At the bottom, I decided to use different images of squirrels on a dead tree trunk including a baby. I am on a campaign to get calligraphers to ensure that their work can be identified in the future by putting their names or their known cipher on their work. Here I wrote my name as small as I could in the same red colour underneath the leaves. And now the piece was finished!

Red Squirrels and an Uplifting Quotation

This quotation by J B Priestly is new to me and as soon as I read it I wanted to write it out. At these challenging times (April 2020) the words hold just the sort of promise that we need – tomorrow is a new day, a fresh start, and those wonderful words ‘with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning’! What could be better than that. I seem to be writing out a few long narrow pieces lately, and when I wrote out these words to see how they would ‘fall’ on the paper, they followed that pattern. I wanted to emphasise some phrases more than others – ‘a new day’, ‘a fresh start’ etc, and wouldn’t normally have written them in alternate lines like this, but that is just how it happened; and, of course, that ‘bit of magic’ needed to be different for significance! To add emphasis to the initial and the top lines I added a few flourishes.

The piece was written out on vellum for The Prince of Wales, President of the Heritage Crafts Association, to thank him for his kindness in suggesting his own President’s Award – an annual award for endangered crafts as identified in the Heritage Crafts Association’s Red List of Endangered Crafts. It was a beautiful piece of vellum which, once prepared, took the writing and paint very well.

As it was for The Prince of Wales I wanted to make it personal to him and so checked to ensure that he was as keen on red squirrels as ever, I was told that indeed he was. If newspaper and magazine articles are correct, His Royal Highness encourages them to come into the house at Birkhall. So at the top I painted a tiny red squirrel no more than 10 mm high eating a hazelnut. (Sadly the magnification doesn’t really show the detail of each hair being painted separately.)

Then at the bottom of the writing, to round it all off, I painted a squirrel looking alert, as though it was watching The Prince of Wales, and it is holding tiny Prince of Wales ostrich plumes in its paws to make it personal to him.

We don’t really get feedback on whether royal gifts are appreciated (or even seen) but I do hope that, if he sees this, The Prince of Wales’ spirits will be a little lifted by the words by J B Priestly and by his beloved red squirrels themselves perhaps bringing that ‘bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning’.

Designing a vellum panel – the Kellogg College Grace

Creating a suitable design for writing out the Grace of Kellogg College in Oxford on stretched calfskin vellum created an interesting set of challenges. Unlike all other Oxford colleges, the Grace is in Welsh rather than Latin (or even English?) and I was asked to include a translation as well. The college has a close association with the Kellogg Company incorporating an ear of wheat in its coat of arms so I thought it would be appropriate to use this in some way in the panel. And being an Oxford College not only did it have its own coat of arms, but it seemed sensible to include that of Oxford University as well.

So I knew from the start that the two shields would be there in the design and that the text in one language would be in a different style from that in the other language. I experimented with different sizes of nib and writing styles, and also sizes and placement of shields, and made a rough paste-up. This is a very first draft, it became more refined as I went on, but this is where I started.

Starting from the top. The size of the shields needed to be large enough to be significant and be seen, but not so large that they dominated the piece – it was to show the text of the Grace after all, and wasn’t an heraldic panel! Then to join the shields at the top or the bottom, or to have them side by side or even one above the other? As the college is part of Oxford University it seemed best to have them joined in some way and I thought that facing outwards (independent but linked) and joined by the corners touching rather than the shields facing inwards and joining at the curved sides worked best. I decided early on that I wanted to have just a little bit of bling in the panel so used gold for everywhere it would seen sensible to use gold – and even where perhaps it wasn’t! So the Oxford University shield had gold crowns and gold clasps on the open book, and Kellogg College had a gold ear of wheat. I had to check to see whether the number of grains was in the blazon (it isn’t), but did find that the indented vertical line (per pale) had a specific number of complete white ‘peaks’ which represented the eleven founders.

And then on to the heading. I had experimented with capitals for ‘Kellogg College’ and Italic for ‘Grace’ but this meant that there was very much then an hourglass effect in the design. I also wanted to make a little bit more of ‘Kellogg College’ so I re-wrote it in different sizes of nib until I had the one that looked right and also experimented with flourishes. I thought that there was need for some degree of restraint here as it is a Grace after all, so flourishing just the second letter ‘l’ in each word seemed to work best. I also added three gold diamonds made with the pen on the initials ‘K’ and the ‘C’ and used a pencil burnisher to make sure that they shined. Then on to the tricky ‘Grace’ word – there are only five letters and it brought the whole piece to a very narrow place visually. Writing them in capital letters allowed me to space them out without losing the cohesion of the word, and I then used the pen to make a red diamond between each letter, and added a small circle of gold in the centre of each which I burnished using a pencil burnisher so that they shone. This brought the gold and red colours from the shields down into the piece as well. And I wanted to use those wheat ears which I really enjoyed painting, so popped two in before the letter ‘K’ and two into the bowl of the ‘C’.

When there are translations like these it is a choice whether to use two colours (I did experiment with alternate red and green texts to represent Wales, but realised that it was a bit garish and actually this college was in England!) or two styles of writing, and tried also the Welsh in capitals and the English in Italic. As the Grace is said in Welsh, it seemed best to make this more dominant than the English translation, and, conveniently, the top line had quite a few letters ‘d’ which lent themselves to flourishing. Notice that only the first and last of the letters ‘d’ have been flourished in ‘dedwydd’ – more flourishes on the other letters ‘d’ would have upset the rhythm of those flourishes and drawn the eye particularly to that word. I also picked up the wheat ear theme again and painted a couple of very small little gold wheat ears at the top and bottom of the Grace itself.

One of the things that I always suggest to clients who are kind enough to commission such pieces is to say who gave it and whether this was for a particular reason. This is especially relevant when a piece is commissioned for a special birthday or an anniversary, otherwise it could look as if it was just bought off the shelf and not made explicitly for the occasion. It doesn’t need to be big or intrusive – here just a line of small capitals explains who gave this and when and it also neatly finishes the panel as well, bringing it to a conclusion.

And to bring the whole piece together, a single ear of corn wasn’t substantial enough at the bottom, so here there is a sheaf of golden wheat held together by twine. On the same lines of who commissioned the piece and for whom, I am always interested in who has done the work. We expect paintings and drawings to be signed, and the names of authors of books are on the cover and inside, but for some reason calligraphy is rarely ‘signed’. I now always try to ensure that my work is signed inobtrusively s possible either by using just my initials in a cipher (PL) or my whole name. In this instance, the width of the sheaf of wheat determined that I would be able to write only my initial and surname.

Designing the whole piece created a series of challenges which shows the value of trying things out before committing to the final piece, which of course we all know!

Rectors of Chevening

Being asked to create a panel listing the rectors of St Botolph’s Church in Chevening, Kent, was a fascinating project with a number of interesting design challenges. The list goes back to Reginald in 1262 and there were 56 names in all. It’s always a problem working out the size and style of the lettering so that there is a wide enough space for names as long as William de Wintreshull but also accommodating short names such as John Wode and John Crull without having a large white space on the right.

Because it is a formal piece and the script should reflect that, I began by writing out the names in round hand (English Caroline Minuscule), or Edward Johnston’s Foundational Hand as here. However, I soon realised that those long names were causing me problems and the columns would be too wide. I had decided at the start that there should be three columns as two would have made the piece too long and four would have resulted in a wide panel and the lettering for the names would be too small.

So I changed the lettering to Compressed English Minuscule and this worked much better. I wasn’t sure whether the dates should be in black or red – the problem with a vibrant red is that it can be overwhelming sometimes. I tried both and realised that actually the red dates looked better than the black. I also asked the client if there were flowers or plants associated with the church.They didn’t have any ideas so I looked for suitable biblical texts and thought that John 15: verse 5 seemed very appropriate – ‘I am the vine; you are the branches’, the rectors being the branches in spreading the word. This also gave me the opportunity to use vines and grapes as decoration.

It took a little while to get the information correct. After I had written out the rough it was suggested that where there were two rectors in one year the date was omitted which really didn’t look right, and then that there should be an ampersand rather than the year as here, but this didn’t look right either. In the end it was decided to revert to my original layout.

The piece was so large that I couldn’t stretch the vellum before I started as I wouldn’t have been able to reach to letter the top, so I prepared the skin, which was quite bumpy, drew all the lines and set to. Because the heading is often the most daunting I always start with this to get it over with, and then worked my way down the board. I left the red lettering so that I could do it all in one go.

Then it was on to painting the vines and grapes.I decided that the vine should start in the middle of the piece and then the branches should extend out to the right and left. This also gave a nod to mediæval images of the tree of Jesse which also seemed rather appropriate. To get the best balance with the lettering and the position of the paintings within the piece, I designed it so that the leaves and grapes were the largest at the bottom, a little smaller either side of the name ‘St Botolph’s’ and then smallest of all on the row just above the columns. I don’t know how many leaves I painted, and certainly not how many grapes, but there were thousands it seemed!

The skin was very bumpy as can be seen when unstretched, and so it needed to be dampened and then pulled round a strong piece of wood and carefully attached at the back. This will also help to keep the vellum flat in the cold and sometimes damp atmosphere in many churches.

No roses for Christmas

Each year I try to find something a little different for our Christmas card, and the Shakespeare quotation of ‘At Christmas I no more desire a rose Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth; But like of each thing that in season grows’, from Love’s Labours Lost, seemed rather apt. I so enjoyed writing and painting the card I did a couple of years ago where I used the words of the first verse of the ‘Holly and the Ivy’ carol, writing round an oval and then painting holly and ivy in the centre as here, that I thought I’d do something similar again.

I sketched an oval and made a first attempt to see if the words fitted. Interestingly, the number of letters was about the same as the Holly and Ivy card so I knew it had to work. As before, I wanted the first line to go across the top of the oval rather than starting at the top middle. The first attempt here almost worked, but I started too high up on the left hand side, which meant that it didn’t balance on the right. I tried once more and finally I had it about right.

So I prepared the vellum, sketched on an oval, and got ready to write. I do wish that I could just keep things simple – but no! Writing in a circle, spiral or in an oval shape is always a challenge. The substrate has to be continually turned so that the letters are upright compared to the baseline and it’s very difficult to develop any rhythm and flow. And now I’m thinking, bearing in mind all of the above, why did I decide to write in not one, not two, but three colours? I thought the lettering would look good in oxide of chromium green (a really lovely colour to write with – the Schmincke Calligraphy Gouache version is so smooth), madder red and vermilion but this additional challenge was one whereby each individual stroke had to be considered in terms of the colour that was used before, and the colours were changed even in single strokes. I held the brushes apart in my left hand and simply stroked the quill nib gently on the paint to pick up the smallest amount of appropriate colour before writing.

But it was so lovely writing on vellum that even these challenges couldn’t put me off! Yet again authors don’t always consider calligraphers! Why didn’t Shakespeare know that at some point a few hundred years later I would want to flourish his words when written round an oval? Fortunately the two stretches of words without ascenders from ‘wish’ to ‘fangled’ on the right, and from ‘that’ to ‘Christmas’ on the left, fell sort of evenly either side of the oval, so there weren’t loads of extended strokes on one side and few on the other, and the two areas with no flourishes balanced out. Some of you may also notice that in concentrating on the writing and colours being fed into the pen I got a little short on space and so had to drop the ‘e’ from ‘fangl’d’. I reckoned that this was something that Shakespeare may well have done so didn’t feel too badly about it!

Then it was on to the rose painting. I had taken some photographs of the last roses of summer from our garden, and although it’s always better to paint from life, doing this in November meant that there were no decent roses left to paint! Here I’m two down and three to go. (The colours here are slightly different because I took this photograph in the evening under artificial light – I was working long hours on this!)

And again the finished piece with the three colours blended in places in the text picked up by the different reds and greens in the paintings. The darker areas on the right are wear the unstretched vellum has dipped. It seemed to turn out reasonably well despite this.

Friendships are the best!

Calligraphers are commissioned to write out many varied texts, some of which appeal and sometimes, some not! These words very much appealed and they are sometimes used as a toast; surely most people would agree that actually the best ‘ships’ are friendships! This artwork was to be given to the client’s friend who enjoyed shooting, so I suggested incorporating pheasants into the design.

I wrote the words out as a draft and experimented with various layouts. Essentially, these are four lines at the end of three of which are the ‘good ships’, ‘wood ships’ and ‘friendships’. However, having long lines meant that the these various ships were just lost in the text at the ends. So I re-wrote the ‘ships’ words in majuscules (capital letters) to try to give them more emphasis. But even then the ‘ships’ didn’t stand out sufficiently and the design also looked rather blocky and dull, and so I decided to change the whole shape of the piece. I cut the text into strips of short lines and aimed for a long and narrow piece, but even here writers are sent to try us! The line ‘But the best ships are friendships’ wouldn’t break where I wanted it to! As the whole essence of this toast is about friendships, I wanted that on one line, but that left the previous five words as a long line, and it didn’t break easily before ‘ships’ leaving the three three-letter word ‘are’ stranded on its own line! However, I bit the bullet, thought this the best layout and wrote ‘are’ very slightly wider to give it a bit more emphasis.

To show the client I wrote the words out on paper first with an indication of the size. Depending on the length of the piece and time involved, I sometimes do this or sometimes just sent them the finished pasted-up draft. I was using the equivalent of a size 5 nib so the writing is all quite small and elegant. Although I wanted to give an amount of space around ‘friendships’ for emphasis, here on the draft there was much too much space and the word looked rather adrift from the rest. This needed to be changed in the finished piece.

Once that was approved I prepared a lovely piece of creamy vellum, sharpened the quill and set to. The vellum and quill reacted together like a dream! It was such a pleasurable experience writing out the words in this way and the result was very crisp writing with the finest of hairlines! The writing is very small.

And so to the painting. How fortunate we are now to have the internet! It was not difficult to find a number of images of pheasants. I chose a male and female and painted these in different poses at the top and set in that green sward to pick up the green of the writing. These birds are tiny – just over a cm (10mm) each high. And then to the brace of pheasants for the bottom of the piece. Again I wanted a male and female and, because I thought that the male was probably the bigger bird, I hung them slightly unevenly, so the greater weight of the male was pulling down lower than the female. In the image I had found the birds were tied together with bright blue string which would have looked completely wrong in the subtle colours here, so I changed this into a piece of suitably subtle brown cord. If you look closely, you may even be able to see the twists!

My hope is that it will give pleasure to the recipient and his heirs, as vellum will last!

Props for film and TV

As a professional scribe and illuminator, I am often asked to make props for film and TV. These have ranged from 19th century petitions of ‘thousands’ of names, Elizabethan maps, writing in ‘invisible ink’ and making it reappear onscreen, any number of documents, poems and letters, and, a few years back, to coincide with a big exhibition in Venice by one of the UK’s most well-known artists, a double spread of a 12th century manuscript written in Greek.

The story was that a freed Roman slave had amassed great wealth such that he was able to buy up great treasures. He wanted a suitable palace to display these and planned to take them on the ‘biggest ship ever made’ – the ‘Unbelievable’ – and then build his palace. Sadly, it was said, on his journey a sea monster caused the ship to wreck and the treasures were lost only to be found again hundreds of years later and brought to the surface in the twenty-first century. I was given a very wide brief and set to creating this double spread, checking the designs as I went along. I researched palaces in mediæval manuscripts, and it was lovely to create my own … in the style of! Of course the palace would have a fountain and fish pond and, as with many pieces I’ve done I enjoyed adding a bit of personal amusement. Each fish, for example, had an extra fin from one to four.

I knew that the spread was going to be aged but selected a piece that had a lot of character to it anyway. There was a fair smattering of brown spots which indicated the hair follicles. In my rough sketch I had planned to have carts with treasures being loaded on to the ship but realised that this would take far too long so in the end settled for wrapped bales on the quay, and a few treasures being shown on the deck of the ship. The freed slave, Amatan, is shown here, again in his fur hat and rich red robes lined with cloth of gold, supervising the loading. At this point I didn’t know what form the treasures would be so I painted in a few objects. To ensure that, mediævally speaking, the ship was in character, as it was meant to be so big, the prow extended well beyond the border.

They did give me a sketch of a mediæval monster from a manuscript as a suggestion but I thought it looked far too benign (a bit like a Tellytubby!) so I asked if I could make mine much more scary, to which they agreed. So here it is with horns – because it was evil – rows of sharp teeth and sharp claws. And because the monster was wrecking the ship by creating a storm, I drew a waterline which wasn’t horizontal to reflect that. (I did try it with a very angled sealine but it just looked weird!)

There are quite a few miniatures of ships in mediæval manuscripts, especially connected with the Jonah and the whale story, and I found a lovely image of a sailor falling overboard, which I copied, painting treasures tossed into the sea by the storm too. Amatan and another sailor are here pointing in horror at the monster, and even the ships’ prow is looking a bit scared! The mast is broken and the sail in tatters.

I also decided to have the monster coming up the side of the page and towering over the boat to make it seem even more menacing and had his gold tail pointing menacingly towards the crashing ship.

I then wrote the supplied Greek text and worked hard to ensure that it fitted the space exactly, rearranging the line spacing and the length of the lines to ensure that it did. I was also able to pretty much justify the lines so that the right- and left-margins looked neat.

I knew that they wanted the page aged, and so, once it was all done, took some sandpaper to the painting and roughed it all up a bit. However, when I saw it being used in the accompanying film about the story of the ‘find’, I saw that they had really roughed it up, with the gold leaf blistered and some of the images almost gone completely. The film of the story and the ‘find’ is available on Netflix if you subscribe. And the artist is still causing controversy about the whole project as here.

Quills and Calligraphy

Sixteen eager students were ready to start a day of learning and practising calligraphy as part of the events associated with the fantastic Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms 2018-2019 exhibition at the British Library. We were focusing on the Angled-Pen Uncials as in the St Cuthbert Gospel of St John, a very pleasing writing style, and which has only majuscules, or capital letters.

Everything was set out before the students arrived with a sloping board, pen and nib, ink, etc and sets of A3 information and exemplar sheets so that no ruling lines was necessary while learning.

The morning was spent learning and practising the letters and then the afternoon focused on quill cutting and preparing and writing on vellum. Cutting quills was a lot tougher than it looked – the barrels of swans’ feather are really strong!

It does take some preparation, but once the steps are clearly explained and reinforced to everyone as they cut the feathers, really good quills resulted.

Then it was on to preparing the vellum, practising writing names using the quill and then, with a deep breath, writing on the vellum itself. I suggested using Schmincke Calligraphy Gouache in vermilion as a contrast for the initial letter and this worked really well. The results needed to be admired even halfway through the writing!

And the concentration here was intense!

But the results were very much worthwhile! Congratulations to all students for such a successful day – and for being such a lovely group to worth with.

Patricia Lovett MBE

Calligraphy | Illumination | Design