This autumn I got a question if I would like to do an Albion (King’s Order of Companions of  Albion) scroll for a dear friend. I said yes even do I did not have a lot of time over for doing scrolls. I asked if it was ok if the scroll became a backlog and it was.
I decided to try to make a scroll from one of my favorite manuscripts: The Bible of Borso d`Este. It is an Italian Renaissance manuscript which was commissioned by the first duke of Ferrara, Borso d`Este and was completed between 1455-1461. The manuscript are in two folios and have more then 1000 richly decorated illuminations in it. The making of the illuminations in the manuscript was made by a team led by the artists Taddeo Crivelli and Franco dei Russi. The calligrapy was made by Pietro Paolo Marone.  Read the whole article and source about the Borso Bible here.

The folio from the second volume that I chose to use as model:

This scroll are the first one I made with handmade colors from pigments and gesso that I did on a class held by Lady Alfhild on a event this past autumn. Since I did not have that many colors I had to use some modern gouache to get all the colors I needed and that annoyed me! The colors I had that was made from pigment was ultra marin, yellow ochra, malakit, white, black and red (don´t know wich tint name of those pigments). Also the malakit color crackled a lot so I ended up ordering pigment and started to make more colors at home later on (more about that in another post).

I started with the guilding and the illuminations because I was not sure that it would turn out good. I spent many hours on doing the small details on the borders with bronze powder. When one of the borders were done I noticed that the powder did not want to stick on the pergamenata! So I had to bruch the powder away, add some gesso to and do it all over again….

Some photos from the process.

This is how the illumination ended up:

And here are the final result of the scroll:

Next time I do this type of scroll I will start with the calligraphy! I will also put the edge of the pergamenata under pressure when adding the bronze powder since the pergamenata started to bend when it had dried from the gesso. This probably made the malakt color crackle even more! I will keep on working with handmade colors and learn more about how to mix them so that they don´t end up crackled,