Mr. Ips. seemed to like this one - not nearly so many changes. But now I'm caught up to where he stopped.
Started writing on Illuminators again. I've been doing research on scribes and illuminated manuscripts and am fascinated with the way writing has changed through the years. The type of pen and the way we hold the pen and make strokes is completely different. Of course, pens were quills back then, that scribes cut themselves. They also made their own ink. Quill pens had to be held perpendicular to the page to get the best ink flow. So they held pens between the tip of their thumb and the top edge of the first two fingers, with the last two curled out of the way. The entire hand moved to make a stroke, rather than just the fingers. The hand never rested on the page, but hovered in midair. Which is why it is nearly impossible for us to reproduce exactly the scripts of medieval times. We no longer have developed the muscles to keep the hand steady and true. I attempted to learn modern calligraphy over the winter, but being a lefty provided more challenge than I wanted to overcome. Which made it obvious to me that my little scribe in Illuminators would have been trained early as a righty, even if she were naturally left-handed. Which meant her painting would probably be done left handed. All sorts of magical potential in that clockwise/counterclockwise sort of reversal.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
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