Illuminated Letters – treasury of decorative calligraphy
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
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Filed under: Calligraphy Books
Illuminated Letters – a treasury of decorative calligraphy is a wonderful book about illumination. The book is split in to four sections.
The first section is a very detailed section on tools and techniques. Many books breeze over the tools you will need – not this one. All tools and materials are covered in great detail. For example, detailed guidance is given on how to prepare your workstation, fit a reservoir to the nib, paper types, preparing vellum and making egg tempera paint. Finally there is detailed instruction on gilding and using gold leaf.
Section two deals with a wide of topics about preparing to work, including; layout and design, planning your work, enlarging letters and details, and transferring designs are covered in this section.
The third section of the book is an alphabet directory containing completed decorated alphabets and numbers based on six historic styles which range from 7th-century Celtic to 15th-century Renaissance. Within each historic style, detailed instruction is given on how to create an illuminated letter. Each alphabet sections is followed by a selection of scripts suitable for writing out accompanying text.
The final section of this book is a contemporary gallery showing examples of work from some contemporary calligraphers. The work not only reflects the historical development of the craft, but also shows something of calligraphy and illumination’s exciting present.
