Wood D

The warping of the bristol board the manuscript pages are painted on meant that they needed to be mounted to something more sturdy and able to remain flat while keeping the pages flat. I came up with a framing concept shown below. It involves mounting the page to a heavier mat board, having a thin mat board frame the page, and then mounting the mat board-backed page to reclaimed wood that would sit in a picture frame.

Some people might have picked up the mat boards first. It doesn't really matter which items you get first  since you need them all to complete it. I decided it would be more fun to check out the reclaimed wood first. I've drove by some, but I've never been to a junk yard or any other kind of salvage place.

I wasn't driving, so I took a couple pictures when the car wasn't moving too much.

My destination lead me through the industrial district in the southernmost part of Detroit just above River Rouge area.

Here's a little piece of Detroit history for you. On my way there I saw the Boblo Boat (SS Ste. Claire) docked along the Rouge River. There used to be an amusement park called Boblo Island that the boat would ferry people back-and-forth from. There were a couple other boats further down the river along with it that I wasn't able to get a shot of.

My first stop was the Architectural Salvage Warehouse (ASW). I had never been to a place like this, so it was pretty interesting. There's a lot of vacant and decaying houses in the greater Metro Detroit area, so places like this get new stuff all the time I'm sure.

I really wanted that redish cabinet door. It was that fake, composite wood pulp stuff with a faux cover on it, but the red would have looked great with the Caroline Graphic Renewal page. As long as the ends wouldn't split when I went to trim it down to size, that is.
The man I spoke with said they wouldn't sell it without the whole cabinet though, and they weren't even sure how much it would cost because they hadn't set it up and put it together yet. I didn't need a whole cabinet, and it didn't have much of an old look to it anyway, so I kept searching.

They didn't really have much wood for being a place that does architectural salvage. It was mostly stuff to install or put in your home: ceiling fans, windows, doors, furniture, etc.

They didn't have anything close to what I was looking for besides that red door that I wasn't going to get. They said they have another warehouse with more reclaimed wood and less home furnishings over on the East Side. That sounds more like it.
The other locations I was planning on heading to were either not open or had their warehouses located even farther away than the other side of town. So I hopped back on the Edsel Ford Freeway over to their other warehouse, and it turns out it's just down the block from the old Packard Plant.

If I didn't have more to do back home, it would've been fun to explore. I'll have to come back before the city tears the rest of it down. Piles of brick and cinder blocks don't scare me.

Partially torn down buildings adjacent.

YOGRT's a regular "up" name around Detroit.

ASW's other warehouse.

I really liked their banner. Not the fanciest type, but the saying is pretty solid.

I found some really great boards and a couple panels that will work perfectly for my idea.

There's something satisfying about woodworking. It's one of those more manual labor-type tasks that I enjoy. This wasn't my first time using a table saw. I started a whole other project involving wood pallets a couple years ago that required a lot of table saw usage. Another story for another day.

The panels had to be trimmed down which wasn't a problem, but the boards were not wide enough. This meant I had to saw the board into two long sections, and get the remaining width I needed from the second section. I thought it might look better split into three pieces, so I cut the first section in half. The second section would go between the those two pieces.

I didn't have enough money to grab boards and panels for all the pages, so I'll have to come back. I'm really excited to continue now that I'm down to the last steps before the pages are finally ready to be printed and framed.

When I start gluing and attaching the separated boards together before they're framed I'll take some pictures and show you guys how that works. I'm not sure the matting deserves its own post, so the next time you'll see the pages they'll be fit to be called finished for good. Tomorrow will be something different though, so check back for more.

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!