Illuminated Manuscript, Final
I finished the illuminated manuscript I talked about in my first blog post, and I’m pretty happy how it turned out. It’s not perfect, but I followed the plan I outlined in that first post, and it looks decent. The paper was a little buckled from the laser printer, so I ended up having it dry-mounted so I could get a better picture of it. Here’s the final version: I’m going to talk a little about the process here. I also forgot to mention the font that I used, an Arabic-style English font called Bulan Rajab that I found online here. I love how this turned out. There were quite a few fonts available, but this was very readable and visually appealing. As far as decoration goes, I’m not sure how real illuminators worked, but I decided to put the gold and silver foil (it was the artificial stuff) down…
Illuminated Manuscript Project Beginnings
For my first real post, I thought I’d talk about a project I’m working on for a nonwestern art history class. This one has a studio component as part of the final research paper. For the research paper, we had to pick a nonwestern country/culture and one art medium, and discuss that. I have always loved Islamic art, with its many intricate patterns and designs. I wrote a paper a couple terms ago about a Pictish sarcophagus and compared/contrasted it to the façade of an early Islamic palace called Mshatta from about the same time (~700-ish C.E.). The façade had an intricate vegetal pattern with fantastical animals all over it. It was really cool. Although a lot of what we think of in regards to Islamic art is actually architecture, or at least building related (mosaics inside mosques and so on), but they also have a rich tradition of creating…