The day that I was told that our class was going to be doing a project that would consist of either knitting, stained glass, or illuminated manuscripts, the latter sounded the most interesting at the time. I began thinking of what exactly I was going to be doing for my project. I looked at different examples of illuminated manuscripts that were made in the middle ages. I then looked at some illuminated manuscripts that other people living in my time period were making. They both looked pretty cool. Because our project had to look Celtic, I started looking at different Celtic symbols. Because I am a Christian, I looked to see if the Celts had any Christian symbols. As I was looking around on the internet for Christian symbols, I found two different ones. One is a symbol that is well known to many people, the Cross. It looked like a normal cross, except that it had a small circle behind it and the corners were more rounded than squared. I thought about it and I decided that I would use this symbol in my illuminated manuscript. The second symbol I found is one that is not well known. I have never seen it before this project and I imagine many other people haven’t either. It is a little hard to explain, but I will try my best to do so in writing. It is a symbol that has three segments coming from the middle of it. These three segments turn into swirls and swirl around about three times. It may represent the Holy Trinity, God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, but it may not. It is not very clear what this symbol may represent, but this explanation is a good possibility. I began drawing my picture on tracing paper before I wrote it on the final paper. I decided to make the letter D the center of my drawing, because my last name starts with a D. I was going to put the cross in the upper left section of the D, in order to incorporate it into the actual letter. I decided also that I was going to put the Trinity symbol in the middle of the D, because it takes up a lot of room, and it looks nice inside there.
The second day, I was working in class, I began drawing my picture. I used a ruler to draw the borders of the manuscript, and I also used it for the left side of the D. I drew three D’s, one inside of one, and the other inside of the other. I put in the Cross and the Trinity symbol, and that was all that I did for that day.
The third day that we were working on our projects in class, I noticed that my manuscript looked a little bare. I thought to put a vine with leaves going around the right side of the D. I also thought of the idea to put bars to separate the D from the other empty parts between the D and the border. My teacher came up with the idea to but bars with zigzags outside of the border to create a more creative border. I drew these onto the tracing paper, and finished my drawing.
On the fourth day, I retraced the Illuminated Manuscript on the backside of the tracing paper, and then I placed it on the final paper and pressed the tracing paper and the final paper together. This made the picture appear on the final paper exactly the way I drew it on the tracing paper. This was all that I did for this day of work.
On the fifth day, I brought the paper home to work on it some more. My sister and I decided which colors should go where on the illuminated manuscript, because she is more artistic than I am. After we decided which colors should go where, we colored it in with crayons. We used crayons because their wax will reflect the light very well. We colored in the picture very heavily with the crayons. We then painted in between the different shapes with black paint. This made the different colors stand out more. After this, I let the paint dry and then we were done with making the illuminated manuscript.
I learned a good deal of information by doing this project about illuminated manuscripts. I learned about art and how difficult it is to create it. It takes a lot of hard work and it is not something that can be done in just a few hours. It takes days of work in order to make something that is very beautiful. I also learned a little bit of history of illuminated manuscripts. I learned that monks were usually the ones to write them down and that they went out of style soon after the printing press was invented. This is what I did and what I learned by doing this project.
