Recipes pertaining to illumination on paper and parchment

  1. Illuminations/ drawings:

    1. Life-like (65v): There are some who paint in a life-like manner on oiled paper and if they do not complete their work in the first go, they put their paper with its unfinished portrait in water so that it will not dry.
    2. Painting large figures (65v) You must position your charcoal at the end of a stick in order to make your first drawing from a distance because up close, you would not be able to judge the proportion very well, as you would from from a certain and sufficient distance. Also, when you paint up close, hold the longest charcoal you can as if you were holding it with your fingertips. For in this way you will acquire the trait of an artist, and your hand will be made nimble.
      1. Note (left-middle): Illuminators painting on paper distemper their colors with gum and mix it with a bit of soap to make them run better.
    3. Layer of gold leaf on parchment or paper (10v): Make a very transparent starch glue colle d’amydon with little body. And apply
    4. Brown gold layer on paper (29v):Prepare your underlayer of starch soaked in water and your gold will turn brown very well. Clear starch water laid down on paper, then dried, and so by three times, is a good base for brown gold on paper and is not thick.

  2. Paper:

    1. Thick Paper (81r): One must take some paper from Florence, which is the finest, and crush it and and soak it several times and change the water every day, that way it does not smell bad. And after having moulded it into the hollow, put a cloth over it, and from the back side, rub the back of your paper with a sharp piece, as if you wanted to polish it and it will mould very neat. Then glue some cloth from the back side with strong glue.
    2. Mouth glue (7r): is made of parchment scraps and used to glue paper or similar things without fire, by wetting it with one’s mouth.
      1. Note:It is whipped and left to soak in white wine for one night, then melted over a low heat. Others soak it in spirits.
    3. Whitening paper (12r): >The whitest and thinnest is the best. And when the hollow mold is quite clean, as when it is made of sulfur or baked cimolee, [the paper] comes out very clean. You can apply a layer or two of white, with a border of gold, to imitate alabaster. And after applying the white you may burnish it with a tooth. Yet in order for it to take burnish you should soak the lead white with egg white and fig peel. Or better still, varnish your work with white varnish. Also while you are molding with paper, as it starts drying, burnish the back of it with the tooth.

  3. Written text:

    1. Erasing a letter (46v): Dip a writing quill in fresh and good oil of sulfur and, thus, retrace all the letters with the dipped quill and they will disappear from the parchment.
    2. To write as easily from the left as from the right (19v): Write in the best manner possible with some well gummed ink on as many cards as many words you want to write and when your letter is full of ink, apply your paper and rub with a tooth the back of the cards.
    3. Making à jour letters in paper (46v): If you write or trace something on the paper and heat it soon after, and immediately it will become black; then by rubbing with a sponge, the letter will be cut out because it will be burned. Urb. Or retrace the letter with a wiped quill.
    4. Gold lettering on paper (8r): Write with fig tree milk then let it dry a little, afterwards apply the gold in leaf and, once quite dry, rub with linen and only the lettering will hold.
    5. Mathematic figures without a ruler or compass (19v): you know how to draw a circle with a quill and otherwise with your right thumb nail and your folded big finger if you don’t have any ruler, fold a paper sheet in five or six folds to use it. And if you want to draw a column, arch, oval, cartouche correctly without a compass, fold your paper so the fold is a straight line from which you draw within the relevant distance a point or a line and fill it with some ink. Then fold again the paper and rub it on its reverse and it will stamp whatever you have made. In that way, A is the line without ink made by the paper fold, B is the line you have drawn, C is the stamped one.
    6. Writing without ink (46v): Write with oil of sulfur and heat [it], and the letter will become as black as this one.
    7. Oil of sulfur for the writer (46v): If the writer wants to quickly clean his quill of the thickness of the ink which dried on it, he only has to dip it in oil of sulfur, and immediately it will be white and clean.