Manuscript

This assignment was difficult. Building a manuscript with no tutorage on how? The men that created the works of art we put behind glass at museums had years of practice and education. But lucky for me I didn't have to take a quill to paper.

The manuscript I decided to use is from the Lindisfarne Gospels produced around the year 700. The page I picked had a beautiful snake like design. As well as some color patches in among the text that made the page very colorful.

After looking at it for some time I noticed that the main part of the decorative piece looked very owl like I wanted to put and owl in a tree and do something about my time in Girl and Boy Scouts. I wanted to keep the lovely "Celtic Knot-work" that was around the edges of the page. Yet since the mode of creation was going to be digital I knew that would be a challenge. So I drew some owls and a Celtic Knot fire of my own creation to get some brain storming going. I even wrote down some phrases and such used by the Girl and Boy Scouts to see if I could work those in some how.









I noticed after a bit that there was a grid on the original manuscript that I wanted to emulate right away. But how to do that? I decided to put all the phrases and mottos into the grid it was a challenge but I was very happy how it turned out.

Around that same time I found out something about the swatches in Illustrator. There are several pre-set pallets. One of which was called Medieval, I tried to stick with those colors due to them matching the colors in my manuscript well.

Between fighting with the text boxes and finding a font I worked on my owl. I combined parts of my two drawings from above and stayed will inside the Medieval color range provided by Illustrator. To the right is both the owl and the grid completed. (I failed to get a process picture of the owl but it was mostly just making shapes and placing them.)

 I then decided to bring my Fire-Knot into the digital world. I have never tried to do Celtic knots in digital so this was a challenge all on it's own.

After that I worked on the wording to place on top of my grid. Then I made my tree and added color patches within the large text. The leaves on the tree are modified versions of my flame I made. done with different colors and orientations to give some variety to the tree. I really wanted to have a campfire on the page so I made a little campfire and placed it above the text. Then when I placed the boarder, after much deliberation, I made shrunk down the flame and made a pattern for the boarder.

After that I was unsure on what to do. I knew the piece wasn't finished but it needed something. It needed quite a bit of something. I then added some modified lyrics from a Girl Scout song above the fire. Added more color to the flame. and finished off the design with a different pattern in the left portion of the border and a yellow-ish tone for the background. I wanted the old parchment feel to the page. I am quite pleased with how it turned out. Especially after much worry about not having a good idea. In all honesty I have to dedicated the idea for this page to a mentor of mine who passed away this last week; a Boy Scout Master and great man. Thinking about him and his wonderful influence on me gave me the inspiration much more than any book page did.