Illumination: How to make art

Naturally, an artist gets the most joy and satisfaction if he creates something himself. People with an artistic talent can paint a man or a horse by just imagining how they look and putting that on paper. But most people can't do that. If you are like me and don't have the gift of images, you can still do well by using various technical tricks.

We are victims of a modern "copyright ideology" which dictates that every artist should create new things. Imitating the work of others is regarded as theft or cheating, or at least as low class of art that you should be ashamed of. The medieval scribes would not have agreed. They would have abhorred the idea of "creating something new". Their ideal was to preserve and possibly improve the work of the old masters. Imitating a good picture was a virtuous thing to do.

How to cheat

Not having the gift of images means I can't draw a man or a horse just from my mind. Whenever I need to draw something that's too difficult, I cheat. And I recommend you to do the same. There is no copyright on medieval documents. If you have access to a copying machine, use it. When I find a nice picture in an art book, I xerox that picture.

Photographic images, especially colour ones, usually yield bad results in the copying machine - all you get is a blob of grey. When this happens, I put transparent drawing paper over the picture and trace the outline with a 0.35 mm drawing pen. With time, I have gathered a fat collection of such copies - a treasure trove of everything I might want to depict on a scroll.

Find a picture, drawing or photo of the thing you need, and copy the outline onto the scroll with carbon paper. There are many types of carbon paper, so you need to look out. Some will create fat, smearing lines. Others are impossible to erase. Try several different brands.

By creative use of a xerox that can enlarge or diminish, you can do pretty complex cheats like taking a picture of a horse and combining that with a different picture of a man, so that he appears to be sitting on the horse. Or you can enlarge a minute illumination so that it fits your scroll. Bringing the photocopy or transparent outline onto the scroll is usually done with carbon paper. Since most types of carbon paper images are non-eraseable, it is wise to do any experimental combinations on a separate paper first, and put them onto the scroll when they look good.

Remember that you don't have to use everything that's in the original. If you want a horse, it's often enough to copy the outline only, just so you get the proportions right. Then you can do the details yourself. You can change things, like the angle of the horse's head or the way it holds its legs, or its trappings, with a pencil.

Tracing

Carbon paper has many drawbacks: you can't see through it, you can't erase the lines, if it is moved slightly everything will be in the wrong place, and an accidental touch may make marks on the paper. A better, if more laborious, method is to trace by light. You can tape the picture on the inside of a window that the sun shines on, hold (or tape) the scroll over it so that you see the image through the paper, and trace.

Another way is to get a piece of window glass or plastic (preferably ca 12 x 12 inches), rest it on two piles of books and shine your desk lamp under it. You can then put the original and your scroll on it and trace.

Templates

If you are doing a pattern that is repeated several times, a template can save a lot of work. This is a particularly useful timesaver with Celtic knotwork. I have often made a photocopy of a Celtic pattern, and then repeatedly carbon-copied or traced the same pattern onto the scroll, e.g. to create a border.