DIY Text Production

For this assignment, I made a page of  “manuscript” with a quote from Winnie the Pooh written in Carolingian calligraphy and painted on with an egg yolk and pigment paint that I made. I used a compass to set the lines and margins of the paper. I then used a bottle of ink and calligraphy pen that I luckily already owned at home to write the quote. I then scraped the pigment of an old eyeshadow set I owned and mixed the pigment with egg yolk to make paint. Finally, I used a paint brush to paint on the “manuscript.” I thought this process was a lot of fun, but also extremely tedious. The majority of the time involved setting the lines and margins and writing the calligraphy. I am definitely a perfectionist, so I think that is what caused the writing process to take so long because I restarted on multiple occasions. The experience certainly gives me a better understanding of the amount of effort that went into ancient manuscripts. Mine was quite simple and still had mistakes, but the manuscripts produced in the past were way more intricate and unflawed which of course must have taken much more time and effort.