Making a Manuscript

I'm going to be posting daily for a little while until I can really catch everyone up with where I'm at right now in detail.
There were posts related to what I was doing during that long stretch of silence that I didn't publish which will now have to wait until after I tell you what I've been doing recently. That makes the posting a little out of chronological order, but if I published those other posts first and waited to tell you about what I've been doing recently, it would all be old news. Right? Right. So here we go.

Cover of the Passio Sanctorum Martyrum Decem Milium.

Manuscripts and codexes were the first books to be made before more advanced methods of bookmaking and binding were developed. Printing presses had not yet been invented, so every page of every book made during these times was hand-lettered and all the illustrations were one-of-a-kind. The more decorative of these are often referred to as illuminated manuscripts. Illumination of the page wasn't limited to gold leaf embellishments. They include decorative borders, stylized "drop-cap" initials, which are the large letters that usually start the text or a portion of it, and individual scenes that sometimes but not always relate directly to the text, which are called miniatures.

(click on the pictures to view full-size) 

Pages from a Book of Hours, Les Enluminures (1490), and the Serat Jayalengkara Wulang (1803), a Javanese manuscript.

No matter what their background was, these different groups of people had a desire to transcribe their thoughts to pages to be passed around. From the very beginning, bookmaking has been about the transfer of knowledge and ideas. It really is a powerful thing.
A Book of Hours, as pictured above on the left, was a type of manuscript. They were prayer books for Christians containing different prayers to say throughout the hours of the day, hence the name.

Pages from The Book of Wonders of the Age (17ᵀᴴ/18ᵀᴴ century) and the Book of Kells (c. 800).

One of the projects I was working on while I wasn't writing posts was the making of multiple manuscript pages, each in a different style from a different time period. It was for my History of Graphic Design class. I still wasn't finished when I turned them in. The class ended, and even an extension went by without any of them being completely finished. What work I had done received a B that was much appreciated, but I wasn't about to leave them unfinished. They still need a little work, but not very much.

I had already planned on using them after the class. While staying true to the style of each culture, I wanted to make an original image that I could use later and meant something beyond conveying a likable picture. Some of the pages contain more meaning than others. The ones that do not are more direct, or just meant to convey the style. A lot of reference images were used as inspiration throughout the process, but the overall image and text are all me.

I figured watercolors would be the best choice of medium since it's relatively close in consistency to tempera paint which was traditionally used. They're also very forgiving. You can remove paint you've already laid down just by lifting it with some water and a paper towel.
I used bristol board to paint on, and that was not the best choice to pair with watercolors. I figured since it was a kind of card stock it would hold up better to water absorption. It ended up warping and bending immediately after I stained each page, but I had bought an entire pad of bristol board just for this project, and I already had the idea laid out, so I went through with it anyway. I figured I could mount each page to some kind of heavier board with some adhesive to keep them permanently flat.

Classical (Greek/Roman)

Celtic

Caroline Graphic Renewal

Spanish Pictorial Expressionism

Gothic

Judaic

Islamic

Late Medieval

Now that the class is over, I've decided the collection of pieces are going to be my next series as an artist. I say "next" because I've already started a different series you'll learn more about later, but I'm farther along in this one since it was a class assignment, so this will be technically be my first. There are not enough pages to make a book, and the continuous style and language change would make it a difficult read, but they would look nice framed.

As soon as each of the pages are finished, they're going to be mounted on and matted with board, then mounted again on reclaimed wood I picked up from downtown. I'll show you some of the boards and pictures from that trip tomorrow.

I'll be translating the Islamic and Judaic pages for you guys further down the line. There's also some distinct differences that set some of my pages apart from others made by the culture at that time that I'll also be explaining in the same post, so don't miss out!