My latest scrollwork is a pelican scroll made for a dear friend that I known for soon 10 years. It was inspired by folios from the Mira manuscript that is one of Wilhelminas favorite manuscript. Here is the foolios I was inspired by. The rose comes from the first one, calligraphy, capital letter and one butterfly from the second one and one butterfly from the third one. The pelican is inspired from  a stained glass picture.

It’s the first scroll I ever made on parchment. It might become a expensive habit since it was really lovely to work on. Before starting on the parchment I practised and wrote the calligraphy on pergamenata to make sure the final design would fit the parchment. I needed to make the scroll bigger then the original folios since I couldn´t manage to write this callligraphy style smaller. Something to practice! Anyone who knows the name of this Georg Bocksay style? I am hopeless on knowing the names of diffrent scripts!

The calligraphy is written with iron gall ink that I wrote a post about how to make some months ago. After finishing the calligraphy the capital letter was made with gesso and bronze powder layed down with a quill pen. It took two layers to look good. At first it looked like the gesso bleed out in the parchment but when it dried up no stains where thankfully visible.

The illuminations are painted with colours I made myself. Many of them also contains my own pigments made from descriptions from mostly Cennini. You can find some blogpost about how some pigments been made in earlier post and more will come.

Colours in the illumination

The rose

The rose is painted with colours where I made all the pigments myself. The leaves and stem is mostly painted with various layers of malachite green to create brighter and darker parts. Some iris green and swaneholms ochre where added to create more life in the shading.
The rose petals is painted with brazil wood pink. I made this pigment from lake of brazil wood that was mixed with grinded oyster shells and then dried. Some ultramarine grinded from lapis lazuli where added to create more life in the darker shades. There is only white works on the brightest parts of the flower petals where I used bone white. The other shading is made with less or more layers of colour.

Butterfly nr 1

On both butterflys I used a mix of handmade and bought pigments. The bought pigments was titanium white and french wine black. The titanium white was used on the wings and the french wine black pigments for the tentacles and the small spots on the wings. The blue used for detail works is ultramarine blue made from lapis lazuli.
The grey colour  is a ocher made from blue clay that I dived down and picked up from a bottom of a lake here in Swaneholm this summer.

Butterfly nr 2

This butterflys wings is painted with mostly bought pigments such as french wine black, carmine red and italian gold ochre. The bodu and other brown details is Cudgel ochre that I collected during Cugel wars in Aarnimetsää this summer. It seemed fitting to use Cudgel ochre since this also was where Wilhelmina asked if I wanted to make her scroll for her upcoming elevation.

The pelican in her pity

The nest is painted with Cudgel ochre, Swaneholms ochre and some french wine black. The beaks with iltalian gold ocher and the blood drops with carmine red.
The pelican and her babies is painted with blue clay ocher and bone white made by me and titanium white that I bought. Her eye and details on the beak is made with french wine black.

I decided after trying to make both bone white, chalk white and eggshell white that I probably will use bought pigments to my white colours when wanting the clear white results. I will not make lead white for example as I think my health and the enviroment is much more important. My goal is to have almost all colours made with my own pigments besides does very toxic ones.

I will continue to try and find yellow ochres, or all kind of ochres. I will also try to make a deep red colour from kermes and cochineal ( brazil wood and madder red I have done but I want a pigmnet that creates a deeper red). I will also make more black pigments in the near future. I have burnt bone laying around that needs to be grinded but I have also saved some peach core from my tree to be burned and grinded and I am planing to make some lamp black and wine black.

Here is a picture of the finished scroll (A3 sized)