An AoA in the style of a Carpet Page

Every now and again I get an assignment for someone I actually know - these, honestly, are the best and the hardest assignments. Pressure! But the good kind ;)

When I received this assignment, I immediately reached out to get confirmation on some ideas I had from the one who wrote him in, and everything fell together wonderfully.

The finished scroll: inspired by the Book of Kells, containing wolves instead of cats as was the preference of the recipient.

Gouache on Perg
Calligraphy, Words, and Illumination by me.

The Book of Kells is available online, however, I pulled this image from a book I own. In the original Book, this is f 187v, The End of the Gospel According to Mark. I chose this specific page because of the text placement.

I replaced the Book that Mark was holding in the original with a shield for the recipient's Arms. The lion on the right was done partially in blue to allude to the East Kingdom's blue Tyger.

The recipient loves wolves, so the cats that originally appeared in the uprights on each side were replaced with a Celtic style wolf, modeled on a wolf that appears elsewhere in the Book of Kells.

I am, overall, very happy with how this turned out. I did trace the general design of this scroll from the original page. All detail work was done freehand. The colors were matched to the online images from the Book of Kells as the book I have is a poor quality for color matching. I used Higgins ink and a Mitchell nib, and I am never switching away from Mitchell now that I know how easy they are to use. The control was significantly easier.

When I was doing the layout for this scroll, the original has very few words in the center sections. It took a lot of trial and error to get everything to work out. I did intentionally lay out the text so that the word East is centered and the only word on the line.

This broke one of the "rules" that I've set for myself in the past, that the illumination should encapsulate all the text, including the signatures. I wanted to follow the original with the text size as much as possible, and using a scan of the page and a text editor I was able to reach the look that fit best. This couldn't include the signature lines, so I placed those below the finished piece.