From: owner-scribes@castle.org (scribes digest) To: scribes-digest@castle.org Subject: scribes digest V2 #3 Reply-To: Sender: owner-scribes@castle.org Errors-To: owner-scribes@castle.org Precedence: bulk scribes digest Thursday, May 14 1998 Volume 02 : Number 003 In this issue: Re: [scribes]: Burnishing tools (was: Rubrication?? Re: [scribes]: Burnishing rips gold Re: [scribes]: Copperplate [scribes]: Teaching Calligraphy [scribes]: Gold thickness Re: [scribes]: Copperplate RE: [scribes]: Copperplate ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 08:58:59 -0700 From: "Carolyn Richardson" Subject: Re: [scribes]: Burnishing tools (was: Rubrication?? >>would make the weight of a single leaf 0.54 grain (if there were no waste). An average modern gold leaf weighs about 0.20 troy grain, and a double weight gold leaf about 0.40. Presumably, therefore, Cennino's best gold was about<< I would question whether this is truly accurate, though. According to the Easy Leaf catalog, "double" weight gold is only 10% heavier than regular loose leaf. That's been true of all the gold dealers I've dealt with. Just because they're calling it double doesn't mean it really is (and they'd undoubtedly be charging twice the price for a book, rather than only $1 or two more since they charge by weight). Even when using double weight, you need to use at least 2 sheets in the same area to get any kind of thickness that you can burnish. Tetchubah of Greenlake Kingdom of Caid ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 09:40:22 +0000 From: "Laurie Cavanaugh" Subject: Re: [scribes]: Burnishing rips gold Eibhlin writes: > BTW... another thing that causes gold to pull off is not enough moisture in > the first place. I have to really watch for this when the humidity is low. The > outer edges of the gesso will hold the gold down nicely, and it looks great. > When I go to burnish, the middle of the gold will flake off. For those of us who live in a very non-European climate (USA desert southwest for example), I found a cool-mist humidifier to be the answer to my gilding problems. I run the humidifier on full blast until I start to feel like I'm at Pennsic again, only cooler. :-) The leaf goes on like a dream, but I have to remember to wait a while before burnishing or the gold rips. This beats the heck out of trying to breathe more than 25 times on a square-inch section. :-) I'm using Gabriel Guild Gesso Sottile. This combination is giving me the best burnish I've ever done. I only have two burnishers that have ever worked with any reliability. One was a gift, but it looks like exactly the same setting and handle as the other which I bought from Sinopia (www.sinopia.com). > I've learned to recognize a lot of the mistakes just by how the gold looks. I > find this really helpful because most of the problems can be overcome if I can > just pinpoint the cause. When I'm teaching a class on gold leaf I like to take > along my first piece. It has a lot of the common mistakes. I can point out > which mistake was caused by which problem, and tell the class how to correct > or avoid it in the first place. This is a great technique, and it also shows newer scribes that everyone starts out near the bottom and climbs from there. > When it comes to laying gold, like most > scribal skills, practice is what allows us to do a technique with a moderate > amount of proficiency. > > Eibhlin ni Chaoimh > AEthelmearc Yes, and that rapturous feeling of burnishing up a newly-laid piece of gold and seeing that amazing shine is worth all the tedium of practicing. [I have a theory that every art within the SCA is pretty tedious to those who aren't enraptured by it. I feel that way about needlework, but I can sit and do calligraphy or tiny outline strokes on a scroll for hours. Go figure. :-)] Morgan Athenry Dreiburgen, Caid Laurie Cavanaugh Young Minds, Inc cavanaug@ymi.com Splendor is worth the effort. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 13:26:15 -0400 From: Michel Macdonald Subject: Re: [scribes]: Copperplate Greetings, I am interested in the Copperplate hand, but have no documentation about it. Does anyone know when and where this hand was developed. Is it in period? Michel ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 13:53:54 -0400 (EDT) From: randyaf@provide.net (Randy & Melody Asplund-Faith) Subject: [scribes]: Teaching Calligraphy Has anybody touched on these points yet? If so, pardon my redundancy. A beginning calligrapher, like a beginning painter, may find frustration in the shakiness of their hand. It helps to re-assure them that for most people starting out, they have not built the fine muscle control which will allow a smooth hand. THAT is natural, and a big thing cured by practice. One needs the kind of practice which is akin to physical excercise. You have to repeat often enough and long enough to build muscle control. A lot of people say "Don't worry, It'll come with practice" and the student just figures it is a head thing. This is one reason why I think infrequent artists take so much longer to make progress. It seems to be a physical thing, like getting in shape. "Work on a sloped desk with your hand in front of your shoulder" was what Mistress Elizabeth Karien of the Four winds taught me. Your arm uses gravity as a vertical guide. But even more, when your arm is writing off that shoulder center, your arm muscles are having to constantly compensate through to the fingers. This can lead to vertical lines getting curved or leaning. Get the ink to flow really freely and just use light flowing strokes with speed. If you clamp down on the quill or brush, your muscles are tense and will produce squiggly lines which look more like really short straight lines in unfortunate directions. RELAX!!! The best way to get a smooth and well shaped stroke is with a moderate speed and the pen held gently. If the ink won't flow unless you have to push down hard, you are going to have a lot of bad effects. Pushing down hard can: 1) Tear the paper fiber, 2) Cause the pen to veer along paper texture, 3) Cause shakiness in hand muscles, 4) Inhibit fluid stroke shapes, 5) Inhibit pen manipulation. A feather quill pen is great because it lets you glide on the page with almost no pressure are all. I have difficulty getting this out of my metal nis and I use TAPE and BRAUSE nibs. My way around it has been to press the pen to get a flow going, then release pressure to glide with the tip until that charge ends. What are some of your techniques? As for teaching letter forms, I start by instructing a student on what calligraphy structure is all about. That means figuring how to rule it, how wide the nib should be, how far apart to space elements, etc. Then I teach them the different ways how the pen creates a line, including what rotations and tipping onto the corner are about. Once they can doodle these effects randomly on a page, then I teach them how to look at a letter and figure out how to reproduce the form with the techniques. That way, they can learn to make any type of letter by just looking at it. It doesn't matter if it is a insular Minuscule or a Late Secretary hand. All they need is an exampler to show the letter shape. A pattern with arrows showing somebody's codified order of strokes becomes unnecessary. Floating: This is when you have ruling lines above the ascender height and just below the minim stroke (minim is the height of a lowercase letter like "i,m,n,o",etc., not a descender like "p" or an ascender like "d"). Letters are written between the lines and never touch. The typical medieval way to write in a book. This was the hardest thing to learn. For the longest time I couldn't write a line without it going up and down like a high sea in monsoon season. Then I just decided to do it until I got it "write" (yeah, pun intended). It actually took a lot less time to learn than I expected. It was a case where, having already acheived the muscle control, repeated practice for substantial amounts of time each sitting, actually WAS A HEAD THING. Now that I can do it, I save a lot of time at the ruling stage, and I can have the luxury of ruling in pencil as the final, non-erased ruling line. The real trick to doing it was deciding that I could afford to waste enough time and cheap paper to do the practice, and the decision that I could accept that practice pieces would look like crap for awhile until I got the knack of it. Once I accepted this, it just began to flow. The less I worried about it, the less it looked like I had much to worry about. I just thought I would share this in the hope of inspiring some people to take a chance and move up a level. Godd Luck, Ranthulfr Asparlundr, OL, KSCA Randy Asplund-Faith 2101 S. Circle Dr. Ann Arbor, MI. 48103 (734) 663-0954 http://www.provide.net/~randyaf ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 13:53:52 -0400 (EDT) From: randyaf@provide.net (Randy & Melody Asplund-Faith) Subject: [scribes]: Gold thickness Thanks to the scribes who wrote in about the difference between patent and loose gold, and especially Thomas Brownwell for that really good bit of explanation! I knew it couldn't be the fact that it was on paper which made the difference. The only things left had to be either metalurgical content or thickness. For me, this is just the kind of imput that makes this scribe net really worth listening too. Having heard of the weight of medieval gold from the Cennini accounting, Master John the artificer was getting thick gold for a really low price a few years back. I don't remember if he imported this from India or just found a nearby source. I wonder if he is still getting that? I have a package of it and it handles nicely. If you consider the uses of modern leaf sold commercially in the US (I'm not meaning to slight the rest of you here. I'm just pointing at my sources) it is mostly meant for going on signs and picture frames. I got this info by asking the retailer who bought it the most. Unless we get special stuff, we illuminators seem to need to compensate with extra layers. I had no idea that patent leaf was that much thinner than loose leaf, but I never found the typical loose leaf to be quite enough either. I actually don't try for picky effects like letting the color of the gesso show through (especally since most medieval color schemes I useend up in the red/blue/gold color system). When it does happen, I consider it a problem. I lay glassine over a gilded section after burnishing to reveal such thin spots. They show up artificially dark when you do that. It makes it really easy to check. Ranthulfr Asparlundr Randy Asplund-Faith 2101 S. Circle Dr. Ann Arbor, MI. 48103 (734) 663-0954 http://www.provide.net/~randyaf ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:53:42 -0500 From: "Helen Schultz" Subject: Re: [scribes]: Copperplate Michel said: > I am interested in the Copperplate hand, but have no documentation about > it. > > Does anyone know when and where this hand was developed. Is it in > period? > - ------------------ I'm at work at the moment and don't have the ISBN, but David Harris' book "The Art of Calligraphy" has some instruction on Copperplate...and, something I didn't know until I read his book, Copperplate is within out period (very late, but within). I had always thought it was more of a 19th century thing. Learn something new all the time!! KHvS ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 14:19:31 -0400 From: Knott Deanna Subject: RE: [scribes]: Copperplate Hi Michel! Copperplate is a very late period hand. One of the earliest movable = types was called copperplate and I am not sure if the hand was called = copperplate because of the techniques used in printing or if the printers = took the name from the calligraphers. Amazon.com has a couple of books = that I have been looking at since I went to Quebec with TRM in December. = There is a woman in Havres des Glaces that does beautiful calligraphy and = one of the scrolls was done in copperplate and it was gorgeous! That's = why I started looking into it. Anyway, here is the book info. Hope it = helps. >>>Calligraphy in the Copperplate style Herb Kaufman, Homelsky / Paperback / Published 1981 Our Price: $2.80 ~ You Save: $0.70 (20%) The Technique of Copperplate Calligraphy : A Manual and Model Book of the Pointed Pen Method ~ Usually ships in 24 hours Gordon Turner / Paperback / Published 1989 Our Price: $3.16 ~ You Save: $0.79 (20%) As you can see, both of these books are outregeously priced. With the = prices of books these days, it is a wonder that any scribe can get good = reference matierials. ;-) bye honey! Avelina ------------------------------ End of scribes digest V2 #3 ***************************