First Time Working with Goatskin

This December I had the chance to make a long-term service principality award for someone with a Slavic persona.  Honestly, I forgot the details so I may be misremembering, but basically I used a page from the Peresopnytsia Gospel as inspiration because it was appropriate for the recipient so if I use the incorrect term for the persona, apologies.

 

My Laurel, Yrsa Kettilsdottir, and the Principality Scribe, Dáma Maminka the Bohemian, kept poking me about documenting the process so you get a ton of bad photos because I'm not a photographer! 

 

My spouse also got a few sheets of goatskin and I thought I'd use the smallest piece of it for this project.  I think it was about 7" square?  Not very big at all.  I used the flesh side because it's supposed to be smoother, but as you can see from this first picture it had a suede-like texture.

 

 

I read online that pumice stone is recommended for smoothing so I grabbed my unused foot scrubber because it's flat and a small piece of hematite that I use because I keep forgetting to get a proper houndstooth.

 

 

 

It was a bit of a disaster so I just smoothed the crap out of it with my tiny hematite and tried not to worry about it due to time constraints.

 

Using my light table, I traced a printout of the image I wanted to use (first attempt visible in upper right corner).  However, I couldn't find a high-definition scan and gilt doesn't photograph well so I did my best and reminded myself that extant knotwork wasn't always perfect, even though this particular one was.  I used my circle templates to make the rings.

 

 

Then I put the pencil draft under the goatskin on the light table.  Shockingly, goatskin isn't terribly transparent.  In the pencil layer I discovered that graphite transfers ridiculously easily and erasers don't work on parchment (there's a quality difference between vellum and parchment that I don't remember at the moment and I don't particularly care to split hairs so if I'm using the wrong term, you get it via context), but it scrapes so beautifully compared to cold press!

 

Did blind ruling for the first time and darned if I can remember the ink and nib size.  As you can see, the ink bled a fair bit in the particularly fleshy bits.  Black-lined in micron.

 

The wording is transliterated using Boyarin Ivan Matfeevich Rezansky's article on medieval Cyrillic.  Superb resource, especially for people unfamiliar with the International Phonetic Alphabet.  Apologies to anyone who reads Cyrillic, I'm pretty sure the recipient does not so I'm ok with this.  Plus, it means I can share in progress pictures with nearly everyone because of how few people can read it.

 

Someone suggested using gesso to take the 3D glasses effect to the next level, but that would be yet another learning curve that I didn't want to add, especially in such narrow channels.  The gold is mica powder mixed with water and gum arabic.

 

 

It was only after the clean-up stage that I realized I forgot the award badge.  I managed to squeeze it in between the legs of the K (either that or on the side of the central spire to be balanced with the seal), but didn't remember to take a photo of it.

It's not as perfect as the exemplar, but I'm still quite happy with it.