"Quant de lais..." -- Part 2

In Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, Christopher de Hamel's lovely introduction to some of the world's manuscript treasures, de Hamel devotes a chapter to Hugo Pictor, the painter and illuminator of an 11th-century manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.  We know this because Hugo left us a self-portrait on its final page, with his name and "Imago pictoris & illuminatoris huius libri" ("Picture of the painter and illuminator of this book").

Hugo Pictor, from MS Bodley 717, fol. 287v

Although (or maybe because) almost all of the scribes and illuminators of the early manuscripts were anonymous, I wanted to remember Hugo in my manuscript, and the opportunity showed up in that unhappy initial Q on the "Quant de lais" page.  Here is Hugo's Q.

MS Bodley 717, fol. 087r

Hugo did most of the drawing with a quill, only filling in the blue, red, and dark green with a brush. I reversed the initial to better fit my text (early manuscripts had Q tails falling both ways) and changed the colors, because, for one thing, I wanted to use gold. 

I didn't finish the page because it was wrong in so many ways, lettering errors and just too much stuff crammed in.  What needed to happen, I decided, was for the one page to become two.

The second part isn't finished; this is underpainting.  There will be gold over the yellow, and an additional coat to strengthen some of the color, as well as detail in the miniature and some doodling in the initial B.

"Quant de lais...

...faire m'entremet, ne voil ublier Bisclavret" -- the first two lines of the lai.  Marie tells us that while she is making lais, she must not forget the one about Bisclavret, the werewolf; and, not coincidentally, reminds us that we should not forget her, the poet.

🌀

One of my early efforts was collecting capital letters:

A page from my calligraphy notebook...

which became this:

Another notebook page...

Lombardic (more or less) capitals inspired by pages such as this one from the Dijon Bible at the Bibliothèque Municipale:

Folio 6r evolved from there.

The illustration (the miniature, to be correct) is from the entry for Wolf in the Rochester Bestiary.  This page was a trial of Canson Ingres paper in Oyster, which, I discovered later, is no longer available, and of gilding.

(Still especially don't like the Q, and everything else bothers me at least a little: there will be yet another version of this page.) 

Title page, then and now

As an example of the way my thinking about this project has evolved, this is the first title page from the end of December, last year:

Based on a Beatus from a psalter in the Morgan Library, 6 3/8" x 10".

And the same page, redone last month and finished on June 19:

Based on a Beatus from the Hunterian Psalter, 7 1/2" x 11".

They are both inked and painted on Text Wove paper, but the second version (really the fourth, I think, but we don't need to talk about the missteps) is on a larger piece that has been dyed with tea, because after looking all these months at pictures of parchment manuscript pages, the plain paper looked just too white.

After completing drafts of about 10 pages, and about the time (February?) that I bought a wide-format printer, I decided I didn't need to restrict myself to the page size dictated by how many pages I could cut from a single sheet of paper, and could instead restrict myself to a page size dictated by HP.  The printer would take up to 11" x 17" paper.  I didn't want a standard letter-size page--too modern and familiar--so I settled on 7 1/2" x 11" pages and started redoing the earlier pieces.  

Early in June I started dyeing the paper, first by dipping it in a tea bath.  Then I tried a diluted walnut ink bath.  Then spraying and brushing out.  Walnut is more brown, tea more yellow.  Spraying and brushing dries more quickly and the paper doesn't buckle as much.  Trials and experiments.  More pages to do again, more opportunity to change and improve.