My Black Hours Book Step 4

Step Four - The Fun Stuff

Step Four is week 6 in the Coursera class described in my Current Projects blog. In this section we are to begin decorating our manuscripts and writing in the text. Here is my work so far, but no where near done.

I started out by outlining the Initials and the boxes containing them. I used a gold pen as I am still waiting over two weeks for my W&N Gold in to get here from Amazon. I then filled them in using Liquid Leaf.

One Page Completed - 3 to 6 Hours Each

Now these are the letters I am trying to replicate, but they didn't come out quite as well. I also changed the background color to green and used yellow for all the decorations in the square. I am hoping that the more of these pages I make, the higher the quality will become.

Here is what the finished initials look like. Now bear in mind that these squares are smaller than an inch.

Here is the ink that I am using for the calligraphy. I am still waiting for my gold ink to arrive from Amazon so I will just have to make do with what I have on hand and can get locally.

And now I begin experiment with the writing. Of all the calligraphy hands I have practiced, I seem to be best with the Chancery Italic than any of the others, so that is what I will use for this book. Below are the first initial pages I began to work with, and discovered that I needed to use my smallest nib in order to get the lettering and spacing to work. I think I settled on the Speedball C-6?

And now I finally get to the parts that I enjoy. The first page below I decorated the borders with my own attempt at a design using Ivy leaves that I have drawn before (later on this border gets more detail). The other border decorations were made from looking at the Morgan Black Hours and drawing them by hand, no tracing.

And now, with great care, I begin to color in the background of the borders with blue watercolor. I also learned that blue was very expensive to make, so compiled with the silver and gold inks on top of the black parchment, the cost of a book such as this must have been staggering!

And now onto the gold work. Here it is difficult to keep in mind to make full use of the negative space, but I am sure as I go along with this book over time, that it will come to be easier. Also, I only have the one image of the filled in gold work at this time, but more will be uploaded in time.

And lastly for this section, I will begin an illustration. I had originally intended to make maps showing the various groups for that state, but seeing how they would be split among two pages sometimes did not look very aesthetically pleasing. So the below become my secondary choice. Here are just four of the nine groups in Alabama, the opposite page will contain the other five.

And that concludes this section of my Black Hours project. Hopefully sometime soon I can think of a way to better hide all my impressed guide lines.

Step 4 Cont.

I say Step 4 Cont. here since Step 5 will be the book binding.