In principio

In Principio erat Verbum.  So last night I made a start on the Gospel oh John project.  To avoid my usual slip up of adding or missing out words, I decided to use a "pointer".  I am not sure if that is an actual term.  However in many medieval depictions of scribes at the time, they are shown writing in one book with a quill while using a second tool in the left hand pointing at the source material.  What ever this is actually called (if anything) I can say it worked great.  No duplications or missing words this time around.







Things turned out better than I expected, despite some technical issues with the pen (as in suddenly not leaving ink on the page despite plenty of ink on the nib).  I was aiming for consistency in size and aiming for a more "blocky" presentation of the text, similar to the "justify" settings on a word processor. Frustratingly however, there was more bleed through on this sheet than the test samples sent to me.  Meaning I may not be able to write on the reverse side of this page or future pages.  It defeats the object of the project to have back to back pages throughout, but this is ultimately a training exercise so it wouldn't be a complete disaster.  I will have to wait and see how the reverse looks once I have illuminated this page.  That being said, the majority of this book will be block text. I'll know more once the second page is complete.

Here's a closer look of the page so far:

 

Valete!