illumination

1 post
Photograph of the same artwork as the previous image, but taken from an angle to better show the texture of the paint.

Process blog: Attachment (illuminated journal entry)

Over the past couple months, I’ve been teaching myself how to do art in the style of illuminated manuscripts from medieval Europe. (That’s actually a huge category, which covers hundreds of years and many cultures and therefore many many different styles, but you know what I mean…)

I started by copying pages out of random books – anything I could find a good reproduction of – but I’d been wanting to do something fully original, and when I read the call for art for HOME, the collaborative show between LexArt and LexHab, some things I’d been thinking about came together into the idea to do a piece about missing places that no longer exist in the way you remember them (specifically, my grandparents’ home).

I started by writing a sort of journal entry, or maybe a sort of poetic personal essay? I don’t want to say I fictionalized anything, but I did maybe magnify a couple things for effect. The hardest part was editing it down so that I could fit it on a single page (thank you to my friend Nerissa who helped me with the initial round of cuts and edits!). I knew more or less what I wanted to do with the illustrations, and roughly where in the text I wanted them to fall, but it took a lot of work to figure out how to make the text fit properly. I wrote it all out four times on regular paper to work out the line spacing, quill size, and things like when to say “can’t” vs. “cannot”. On one version, I also did a draft of the illustrations, which you can see below:

Photo of a rough draft of "Attachment", made on regular paper. The size of the final paper and guidelines for the writing are drawn in calligraphy, a draft of the text has been written with quill & ink, rough drafts of the illustrations are painted in. There's a big empty space, a spot where the black text has been written on top of with blue, and lots of pencil notes in the margins.

The real version was pretty straightforward by the time I got around to it, although it was a little stressful to worry about not smudging my work. I wrote the text, let it dry, and then inked the illustrations. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that the script is mostly based on Caroline minuscule, although I did make it my own a little.

Two photographs next to each other in a photo collage. Both are progress shots of "Attachment". The photo on the left shows the text written with quill & ink, with empty spaces and some pencil lines for the illustrations. In the photo on the right, the illustrations have been outlined in ink. In both photos, the parchment paper is taped down on a drawing board and various bits and pieces like paper towel and scratch paper are visible in the background.

After the ink dried, I very carefully erased my pencil marks, and then started painting. I still find it quite challenging to get an even texture with the egg tempera paint – I feel like there must be some kind of trick to it that I haven’t figured out yet. I made the brown extra eggy because it made it streaky and shiny in a way that does look quite a lot like wood stain.

Two photographs combined in a photo collage. Both are progress shots of "Attachment", showing the paper taped down on a drawing board. In the photo on the left, the paintings have begun to be filled in, although none of the green areas are painted yet. In the photograph on the right, the illustrations have been filled in with paint, and a border has been drawn in ink but not yet painted.

After the paint is on, I went back in with the ink to go over any lines that got a bit covered or didn’t look dark enough, and used white ink to add some highlights. I found this piece very challenging to photograph – the angled shot is more accurate in terms of color and paint texture.

Top down photograph of "Attachment", finished but still taped to the drawing board. There are two columns of black text written with a quill pen in vaguely medieval handwriting, spot illustrations of (1) a landscape with green hills, red house, blue sky, dramatic clouds, (2) a secretary desk, (3) a long horizontal landscape of green hills and a red muddy river. Around the text and illustrations is a frame made of lines and vines.
Photograph of the same artwork as the previous image, but taken from an angle to better show the texture of the paint.

I was pretty pleased with how this piece came out, and it was accepted to the show, which was very exciting for me. Here it is on the wall in the gallery with its friends:

Photograph of a wall in a gallery, showing four artworks hanging on a white wall. The one at top center is "Attachment", the subject of this blog post, in a white mat and narrow black frame.

Details:

“Attachment”, 2025, 11 inches by 14 inches

Materials & tools:

  • Pergamenata parchment paper
  • McCaffery’s Penman’s Ink in black (an iron gall ink), white, and indigo blue
  • Quill pens for the lettering (I bought these precut ones and modified the nibs)
  • G-nib dip pen for the lines in the illustrations
  • Sennelier egg tempera paint in carmine, red brown, cadmium yellow light genuine, cobalt blue genuine, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, Van Dyck brown, and zinc white
  • Paintbrushes (Princeton Neptune 2 round, Da Vinci Cosmotop Spin 4 round, Da Vinci Cosmotop Spin 3/0 round)
  • Pro drafting tape
  • Pencil
  • Omnigrid ruler
  • Eraser