Odds and Sods

[klwilliams]

Well, I'm blonde. I didn't intend to be. I wanted blonde highlights, like I've had before, but somehow this time it came out much, much blonder. I don't think I look terrible, exactly, but I don't look that much like me. Maybe it's an improvement. So far nobody but strangers have seen me, so work tomorrow could be an education. I'll ask my boss, since he has a good sense of these things and it's in his best interests too for me to look good.

Not much else has happened lately that's terribly exciting. I took last Wednesday off, and in best Ferris Buehler fashion I only did fun things. This included playing golf at the local nine hole course, by myself, which was very restful and lots of fun. I'm still terrible, but I don't care when I'm having fun.

I also saw "King Kong," and really enjoyed it, though the CGI fights in the middle started to get old, especially the bugs. Did anyone notice that the cook who got eaten by bugs was Andy Serkis (who played Kong, too, and was Gollum in LotR)?

The other cool thing I've done lately is make gold paint. I did a scroll in the Medieval style of manuscript painting called trompe l'oeil. This style is also called "squashed bugs", and is essentially realistic flowers and bugs painted on a gold background. The first time I made a scroll in this style (http://history.westkingdom.org/Scrolls/Branwen/MorganAthenryAA.htm) I used gold leaf for the background, and quickly realized this could not be what they used themselves. You can't paint onto leaf, and adding leaf around a flower is too cumbersome. I've been making my own paints for the last little while, since (a) it much more completely matches the colors in the original manuscripts, since you're using exactly the same materials, and (b) all my gouache dried up. So, I really wanted to make another scroll like this one, and make the correct gold background. In the end, it was pretty easy. I just mixed yellow ochre and scrapings of shell gold, and it came out beautifully! OK, not beautifully exactly, since yellow ochre is a bear to get to cover nicely, I didn't allocate enough time to let things dry correctly, and I'm just not good enough to paint realistic flowers. But...I made the right kind of gold paint! I painted with gold! Yes, I am enough of a scribal geek to think this is very, very cool.

Comments

...from the Home for the Terminally Didactic

[aastg.livejournal.com]

Painting on leaf is easier when you add more binder to your paint. IMO, glair works the best, and there's nothing the in the Rule Book that says you can't add glair to gouache if you need it to stick to leaf.

I'm surprised that you're having such trouble with ochre -- I like it almost as much as ultramarine and cad red for the ease of laying evenly. Are you using gouache or are you mixing your own paint? Too much binder, maybe?

The general rule with leaf vs. shell gold seems to relate to the amount of reflectivity and the scale you are working in. Using leaf on a piece the size of The Hours of Marie of Burgundy is almost impossible, hence most of the gold is shell gold, particularly the delicate acanthus borders; but the large Florentine antiphonaries use leaf almost exclusively.

We're working on a large scale most of the time - so it makes sense to use leaf on a scroll where the original that inpired it, being on a smaller scale, will have been done with shell gold.

Re: ...from the Home for the Terminally Didactic

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

It could be the binder, since I was trying a little bit more with this scroll. At this point, I make all my own paints. My test piece with just the yellow ochre was very patchy, and the image I was copying from had the ochre looking patchy, too (though not as badly as mine).

I find ochre/shell gold to be much, much easier to use than leaf when you want to paint on top of it. They only problem I had was that I had a deadline, so I didn't let things dry as well as I should have.