Burdened Tyger scroll
for Robin McClaren
By His Lordship François Thibault,
mid-June
to 8 Oct. 2001. My sixteenth scroll.
Text
Our Kingdom has known many excellent festivities, and long have We
known that they depend upon the efforts of many. No one could hope to
record all who contributed to the success of Our Twelfth Night
celebration, held in Nordenhalle this past XIIIth day of January. Yet
do We think it meet to recognize certain of Our Subjects whose work
was especially noteworthy. Thus do We, Andreas and Isabella, Rex
Reginaque Orientales, award the Order of the Burdened Tyger to Lady
Robin McClaren, for her efforts as Royal liason and in organizing
volunteers to, inter alia, serve and clean up the feast. Done by Our
Hands, this third day of February, Anno Societatis XXXV, at Carolingia
Celebrates the Arts, in Our Barony of Carolingia.
Construction notes
Calligraphy
- Hand
- Taken from the Isabella Breviary (British Library, Additional MS
18851; I used the Backhouse reproduction, ISBN 0-7123-0269-7, which I
will refer to as BIB).
- Ink
- Winsor & Newton Black India Ink
- Nibs
- Main text: 3/4 mm Brause. Capital: 3 mm Brause.
- Spacing
- 4 mm minim height, 8 mm spacing between baselines. Capital is 3.2
cm square.
Illumination
- Sources
- The layout is taken from the Isabella Breviary, ff. 184v-185
(reproduced on p. 35 of BIB). I had to play with the proportions a
little to get it to work on the paper I had, with the text I was
writing; the only major difference this made is that I had to cut back
on the gold on the right-hand page (the original had a
gold-and-flowers border going around the left, bottom, and right sides
of the text, not just in the gutter between the columns).
- The gold in the borders is gold leaf. (It looks better in person;
gold leaf doesn't scan well, since it's so shiny.)
Unfortunately, after I
spent a couple of weeks burnishing it (and laying down several
layers), my lady wife took another look at the original and pointed
out that it was blotchier than mine. Well, but that's probably just
age, or the reproduction; gold is hard to photocopy. Right? Looking
more closely at the text in Backhouse's reproduction, I saw that it
didn't actually say "gold leaf"; it just said "gold".
So I
sent email to the British Library and asked if it was gold leaf or
shell gold, and they said shell gold. Arrgh.
(They say there are some pages
in the Isabella Breviary with gold leaf borders, and I did
go into this wanting to do some extensive gold leaf; but still. :-)
- The scene on the left-hand page is a combination of the Marriage
at Cana scene from the Saluces Hours, (Add. MS 27697, f. 49,
reproduced on p. 55 of Backhouse, Books of Hours, ISBN
0-7123-0052-X) and the Last Supper scene from the Isabella Breviary
(f. 100, on p. 20 of BIB). The Saluces Hours provided the table,
the people (except that I wound up adding a couple more around the
table), and the tile floor (more or less); the Isabella Breviary
provided the architecture (archways, fireplace, windows).
- Paints
- (All are Winsor & Newton Designer's Gouache unless
otherwise noted.)
- Red: Primary Red. Lightened with Permanent White; highlighted
with Alazarin Crimson.
- Blue: Sky Blue. Lightened with Permanent White; shaded with Caran
d'Ache Cobalt.
- Dark green: Viridian. I don't much like this paint, actually;
it's very grainy, and it's hard to keep it from coming out blotchy.
- Light green tiles: about 4:5:1 of Viridian, Permanent
White, and Primary Yellow.
- Lighter green walls: about 4:6:1 of Viridian, Permanent
White, and Primary Yellow.
- White: Permanent White
- Yellow: Primary Yellow.
- Brown: varies.
- Vines, dark stone: Raw Sienna
- Light stone: 1:1 Raw Sienna and Permanent White. (Varied for shading.)
- Interior of fireplace: Burnt Umber
- Black: Caran d'Ache Black
- Grey hair: 2:1 Permanent White and Caran d'Ache Black.
- Grey metal, stone: 3:1 Permanent White and Caran d'Ache Black.
Misc
- Paper
- Aquarelle Arches Hot Press, 12" by 16".
- Margins
- Roughly 1" on each side; gutter is 1". "Roughly" because the
paper is actually a little larger than 12" by 16". The overall size
of the actual content is 10"x14".
Mistakes
No particularly large ones, but still. See the little red flower
nestled in next to the big blue flower in the lower left-hand corner?
There's no flower like that in the original; it's there to fill a
blank space I missed when I put down the gold.
Next time I do something like this, I'm going to pick the colors
for the large background fields (tiles, walls, tablecloth)
before I do the figures. Some of the people's clothing
doesn't distinguish well from the backgrounds; for example,
the servant pouring
wine out of a barrel is in blue, which blurs too much against the
blue tiles.
I misspelled "liaison" (left out the second "i"). I have fixed
this on the scroll; I just haven't rescanned it yet.
This is the first scroll I've done where I didn't ink in all the
lines on the drawing before painting it in (a bit of a crutch, that
was). However, I think I took it too far. For example, I definitely
should've inked in the edges on the Burdened Tyger, instead of doing
them in black paint; they came out far too fuzzy.