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FREEHAND DETAIL

Lettering

For my first attempts at writing on miniatures, I used fine technical pens (Pigma Micron). It was a good start, but I quickly found that a brush gave me far more control (and color options). The pen ink is densely opaque--difficult to correct mistakes with a touch of paint--and some sealers can reactivate and smear it.

On very small spaces—book leaves, purity scrolls, and the like—legibility isn’t always possible. The scribe’s book here is a ‘mock text.’ Dark brown looks more natural here than jet black. I thin my paint (VMC Black Brown, RMS Blackened Brown) to a wash consistency, with a large proportion of flow improver. With the brush lightly loaded, I pull the tip left to right across the page in an undulating line. The trick is to interrupt the line, breaking it up into ‘words’; this resembles writing more closely than a solid wavy line. The transparency of the paint adds to the faded look of the text. I use some rust brown and purple, again diluted to washes, to sketch out a shape and line representing an illuminated capital and border.

‘Real’ lettering isn’t difficult once you’ve developed sufficient brush control—the right pressure and brush load are important, and practice will teach you these. As with other designs, it helps to have reference. Generally I print out the text at actual and double size. Many painters have better results if they treat lettering as a design, not writing.

To letter the example scroll, I print out my reference text, and mark it at the half and quarter points, which are copied on the miniature (a). I use the same wash of Black Brown as described above, first lightly sketching in the uprights of the characters (b). A second pass defines the uprights and draws in the serifs (c). The final step (d) is another layer of paint for definition and a little cleanup around the edges with the scroll’s base color.