2D traditional-media art

Okay, what the heck. Here's one of the projects that kept me away from 3D modelling for a while. The originals are about 6½x9½ inches (16.5x24 cm). Watercolor, ink and goldleaf on vellum.










I've also got 150dpi versions (1 2 3 4) and 300dpi (1 2 3 4), if you want to see all the flaws up close and personal.

Update: Since the goldleaf looks like ass when you scan it in, here's a pic of what it looks like in real life:

****, I wish I could do that. That's beautiful.

I love illumination.

Are you doing a whole book or what?

Also, is that "real" vellum you're using?

Thanks!

No, just those four pages; an SCA award document for my wife. And yeah, it's real vellum.

WOW!
Very Impressive!

[Thomas P]

Excellent work!

Awesome!

[Chris B]

oh this is terrifc! the best thing i have seen here in a long while!

VERY nice

like a medieval codex.

Originally posted by Godfrey
And yeah, it's real vellum.

Damn, where do you even buy real vellum?


Oh, and little thing, I didn't notice the high res versions last night and went looking through just now...are you supposed to start words with a long "s"? I noticed you are and, I'm not sure of the usage of the long s. Also, in places where you have two, to add more of an archaic feel and visual interest, what about using the long s/short s ligature (ß)?

[Chris B]

wow, christopher knows about that ligature.
respect.

Thanks for the kind remarks, all.

Vellum, though a little pricier than a good handmade watercolour paper, is easily available through places like this. There are also less expensive alternatives; a fellow calligrapher recently told me she orders goatskin drumheads which, though thicker than what you would put into a book, are real vellum (and if you're doing something to put in a frame, or a portrait miniature, the thickness really isn't that important). I'm gonna have to try that.

The lowercase s, in general, works like the lowercase Greek sigma; the long form comes in the initial and medial positions within a word, and the short form only appears at the end. There are exceptions; I've seen one French Apocalypse manuscript where the long s appears in the final position, and Germans did use the short form in the medial position as part of the eszet. I've seen the ß form begin to be used in sixteenth-century English documents when the double s occurs at the end of a word, especially when an italic typeface is in use; before that, they tended to add an e to the end so they could use a double long s.

I'm juſt happy the Microſoft Core Fonts finally ſupport the long s.

Godfrey: Ah, okay. Like I said, I wasn't sure about the rules for the long s. I know it was used in the middle of words, and I know short s-es were used at the ends, but I wasn't sure about the beginnings.

How did you access the long s for your post? I've never had any success accessing unicode characters.

Originally posted by XmESs
wow, christopher knows about that ligature.
respect.

I actually know about it because of you. Remember we had a discussion about it one day, I had always assumed it was the Beta symbol, which is basically how it's treated now anyway, but I figured it wasn't right, especially after you told me it was pronounced as a sharp S. So, I went looking and found out it was a ligature. Since then I have become very interested in ligatures, love them, and typography in general. Maybe I'll dedicate my first typeface to you.

Ha, I just went to your website Godfrey...I just realised I've been there before. I remember the font page. heh

You can access the long-s in HTML by using ſ (assuming it's supported by the active font). Alas, the Unicode format specifies places for long-s, long-s-t ligature and short-s-t ligature, but none of the other long-s ligatures or the c-t ligature. Grrr.

One of these days, I'll rework my fonts to use the Unicode special-use area rather than coöpting characters from the ISO Latin-1 area...

So how did you get it to work here, I didn't think we could use HTML on the forums. And they don't have a key combination like the main ascii characters do.

A lot of new opentype fonts coming out have a lot of extra ligatures, but they're not mapped to unicode places. Your software has to know that a particular ligature is in a particular spot if it does smart substitution or has to have an internal viewer that can extract all the glyphs no matter where they're coded.

HTML tags don't work (a fact which I keep forgetting, dang it), but character entities seem to work all right.

I love the concept of OpenType, but the only PC application that I know of that supports it is InDesign (which is a little out of my price range). I hope OpenOffice will eventually support the non-Unicode OpenType stuff (they're supporting the OpenType tables for Bengali and other non-Roman fonts, so maybe they'll get around to the Roman ligatures and other æsthetic features).

InDesign...god I love InDesign! It is my sincere hope that QuarkXPress dies the most horrible death possible and never, ever shows it's ugly outdated face again.

InDesigny goodness

Microsoft Word is unicode aware, and even though it doesn't have auto substitution like Indy, you "should" be able to access any of the extra glyphs using the "inser symbol" command.

Ecch. As long as OpenOffice is available, I'm not spending the money on Microsoft Office. Worse comes to worst, I can always download the source and add it myself, assuming I want to dive into the poorly documented morass that is OpenType.

Poorly documented? The whole specification is at the MS website. Should be www.microsoft.com/typography

I've read the specs, downloaded the header files and libraries. Nowhere can I find any functions to enumerate the OpenType substitution tables and the sequences within the tables, or to enable/disable those substitutions. If you know where such functions are, I'd love to know!

Can you dumb that down for me?

[Chris B]

Originally posted by Kakaze
I actually know about it because of you. Remember we had a discussion about it one day, I had always assumed it was the Beta symbol, which is basically how it's treated now anyway, but I figured it wasn't right, especially after you told me it was pronounced as a sharp S. So, I went looking and found out it was a ligature. Since then I have become very interested in ligatures, love them, and typography in general. Maybe I'll dedicate my first typeface to you.

respect for keeping it in mind and finsing out more about it, then

ligatures are often neglected by "modern" typograhie, which is sad, really.
i wish i had been accepted at university for design, i could have become a great typographer, but hey...wasn't meant to be. so there..

Well, let's see. Each OpenType font is basically a wrapper around a TrueType or Type 1 font. It contains several different kinds of supplementary information, among which are glyph substitution tables.

For example, you have the 'liga' table, which points to general-purpose ligatures, like 'fi' and 'fl'. When you tell your software to enable ligature substitution, it checks each pair (or, in some cases, triplet) of characters against the table; if it finds a match, it replaces the source glyphs with the associated ligature glyph.

This is all well and good, but the C header files don't contain any functions to find out what substitution tables are available within a font, or what glyph sequences are available in the tables, or even how to tell a program to start or stop using the individual tables. And the documentation doesn't mention any such functions either.

I'm not sure if that's actually any clearer...

Godfrey: OKay, I know most of that, and I was pretty sure I knew what you meant, but wanted a clarification. So I think I know what you're getting at.

If you have FontLab you can find out all the OT calls in a font and if you download the Adobe FDK you should be able to find them out as well.

If that's not anywhere near what you're looking at, try the Typophile forums: http://www.typophile.com/cgibin/discus.pl

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Originally posted by XmESs


respect for keeping it in mind and finsing out more about it, then

ligatures are often neglected by "modern" typograhie, which is sad, really.
i wish i had been accepted at university for design, i could have become a great typographer, but hey...wasn't meant to be. so there..

You know enough design yourself that you could probably do quite well on your own. You know Photoshop and Illustrator, so you're halfway there, the only other things to learn are InDesign and QuarkXPress and it should be easy for you to get the basics down.

Don't they have any type of "community college" there? That's where I'm taking my classes, as long as you have money for tuition you're accepted.

Originally posted by Kakaze
If you have FontLab you can find out all the OT calls in a font and if you download the Adobe FDK you should be able to find them out as well.

That's great if you just want to look at one particular font, but if you're writing a program that you want to have OpenType support, you can hardly require the user to do that for every font they want to use!

[Chris B]

i have worked with pagemaker, indesign is quite similar and i actually like it a lot. can't say i care much about quark, but if i had to, i'd learn it.

there are schools and colleges that offer courses and degrees, when you have the dough to pay for it: 500-1000€ a semester. that'S not the kind of cash me or my parents have available, really...

Chris, that's about how much I've been paying. Almost 600 dollars for 4 3 credit classes a semester. Are there any scholarships you can sign up for?

Originally posted by Godfrey

That's great if you just want to look at one particular font, but if you're writing a program that you want to have OpenType support, you can hardly require the user to do that for every font they want to use!

I guess I don't understand what you're trying to do then.

[Chris B]

scolarships are only for those who are good enough - and since they rejected me allready

nah, it's okay, i have other plans for my future allready

that is so good!
wonderfull

if I may nitpick though (and someone's probably suggested this aready but I'm too lazy to read the replies)

maybe like copy the image, throw it on as a second layer, sepia it, and put opacity of the layer to 15 % or so

the blue and red looks unnatural

it wasn't until the renaissance that a really stable red colourant was found and even then it was very expensive.
and blue used to be gotten out of stone and that was not as bright either.


but that's just a nitpick.


really this is great! must have been quite some hours!

and it really looks kind of authentic, not the makeshift kind...

Originally posted by XmESs
scolarships are only for those who are good enough - and since they rejected me allready

nah, it's okay, i have other plans for my future allready

chris quit it those 3 more people might still quit as they might have signed up for more than 1 studies at a time?

besides if nothing else works I've a good spell to push events.

Originally posted by Sess
the blue and red looks unnatural

it wasn't until the renaissance that a really stable red colourant was found and even then it was very expensive.
and blue used to be gotten out of stone and that was not as bright either.

I based the color scheme (and artistic style) on the Visconti Hours, completed in 1428 (which was well within the Italian rinascimento). There are plenty of reds and blues in that book which have remained vibrant to this day. Besides which, with the amount of real goldleaf I put into this thing, I don't think the expense of paints would really be an issue.

really this is great! must have been quite some hours!

and it really looks kind of authentic, not the makeshift kind...

Thanks. It took me just under a month, working about six hours a night on weeknights, and nearly every waking moment on weekends. The only thing I'm really unhappy with is the quality of the calligraphy, but I can't do anything about that (I have a fine-motor coördination deficiency).