Pages of color and gold - King and Queen's Arts and Science competition

As part of my decision to delve further into the world of Scribal Arts, I decided to enter the Kingdom Arts and Science competition at this past Mudthaw. This was my first Kingdom competition, and my second competition ever.

my original scroll            Ms. Ludwig IX 18, fol. 269 - Getty Museum

I expanded on a work I started for the Laurel Prize challenge in Carolingia - the creation of a 16th century Flemish page, in the "squashed bug" style. My original is Belgian, c 1510. The color, the realism of the flora and fauna, the delicate nature of the page - all this intrigues me and I felt driven to know more about the style.

This is a style we see often in SCA scrolls, as it truly captures the "wow" factor for the "Court reveal"... the background for those scrolls are often done in gold. The question I set out to answer was - is the background actually gold? My theory was that it wasn't simply a gold background - the material cost was too dear. My theory was that it was, in fact, a yellow base with shell gold overtop.

It turns out I was right.

Physical Research:
To determine what the color was, I started with only a scan from the Getty and printed from my laser printer at home. Most likely the worst version of reproduction and very likely not color accurate to the original. I spent many, many hours matching the yellow and blue you see in the background, and managed to match them very closely. It was then possible to create this page using no gold whatsoever and produce a look very close to the original.

This was not correct though, as these pages are, 90% of the time, gold. When photographed flat, shell gold doesn't always glitter. In fact, from what I've found, it almost always presents as a flat area of color. Through talking to other scribes who have viewed these books in person, my own research at the Houghton Library at Harvard and at the Morgan Library in NYC it was obvious that the area is usually gold.

The goal then was to find an example of a color background under shell gold. I found this at Brandeis University archives - a small illuminated book from the late 1400's where a yellow color was laid down in a wide stripe around the inside of a capital letter, and a thinner line of shell gold is laid on top of that. The gold is rough and spare in places, showing the yellow paint behind it.

Text Research:
I looked to texts on practice to find details of the background colors for gold. Much is said about the ground of gold leaf - it is often a rose or red color to deepen the color of the gold. Not much is said about the ground of shell gold, other than it is useful to have one.

Testing:
My first tests were only color matching:


Then were layout 1 and 2


The differences here subtle but distinct. 

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This project wasn't a bust, the research was a good start but ultimately I lost interest in it completely. My documentation for this piece was weak, as rightfully pointed out by my judges, and I thank them for their excellent feedback and guidance.