Secundus Nuntius: Gloria

Greetings from the B site! You're probably asking yourselves "What happened to that lovely writing desk he was using before?" (You're probably not but let's pretend you are).  Sometimes I like to do my work in the living room mostly because it's warmer there, and sometimes I find it easier to paint. Following on from last week's work on the Gospel project I decided I needed to jump back to the Prayer book.  I don't want to simply focus on one project and ignore the other.  I know back in the day scribes would focus on only one project until its completion.  But these projects are as much about practicing and experimentation as they are the end result.

So this week I present to you the Gloria.  Following the same pattern and colour scheme as the Gospel project from last week.  Strangely I had a slightly different problem to what I normally experience.  I had too much paper!  Normally I get about half way down the sheet and think "This isn't going to fit!" yet this time I found myself thinking "how am I going to fill this paper?"

Needless to say it worked out rather well.  I didn't try to keep the block uniformed text, I didn't see the benefit of trying to do so as I thought it would make the whole presentation worse.

I was half tempted to keep things uniform in terms of colour schemes, yellow gold etc.  But the red and white gold seemed to work really well for the Gospel so I thought I would go with it here.


This time around I decided to try out two new techniques.  The first I have actually tried before in practice runs the second I haven't tried at all until now. 

In my collection of various inks I actually own a gold metallic ink.  I've only used it once, and that was back during the altar card project.  Here I decided that the Iesu Christe needed to stand out.  Initially thinking of red which is my default colour for things like this, however my hand found gold first.

The second was applying a second layer of gold (of a different colour) on top of the first.  After applying the white gold and letting it set for about an hour, I then applied the gold leaf as a detail.  My worry was that sometimes gold can stick to gold if the surface is a little damp, I was half expecting to see this horrid mess of white gold and yellow gold when I peeled away the second layer.  But the end result was fantastic, adding a little black ink around the edges adds a nice little effect in different lighting.  After this, it was just applying the paint and the gold highlights, the usual white gold detail down the side.

Here's the end result: