Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Illumination: Other hints

Design

Design is alpha and omega. I usually spend about 50% of the time that goes into making a scroll deciding what it should look like. Here are a few pieces of advice:

Every document has a main point somewhere on the page. This is the place where the whole thing balances, usually where the most massive illumination is. Experience shows that the main point of balance should be somewhere in the upper part of the page. For some reasom the upper left corner is usually the best place, e.g. for an illuminated capital. There are other places that can serve as well, but it should be somewhere on the upper half. Don’t put the biggest illuminations at the bottom of the page - it will look as if they’ve fallen down!

It’s important to balance text and illuminations against each other. Just like text, illuminations can be thick and powerful or thin and oblique. If your illuminations are heavy, use a broad nib for the text so that your text also becomes powerful. Otherwise the text will be crushed by the massive visual impression of the illuminations. This works the other way around, too. An overly massive text can make small, weak illuminations look out-of-place.

Work guidelines

The primary axiom: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” Reality is actively hostile to art. It’s just waiting for an opportunity to destroy your scroll. Dirt, water, greasy food, children with crayons, drunken adults with wine glasses, burning candles and other destructive elements are attracted to calligraphy like flies to horse manure. Therefore you must take precautions and never give reality half a chance. Here are a few rules to help you survive.
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Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Paint dilution & mixing

Dilution

All paints (except ready-made gold paint) need to be diluted before you can use them. Tube paints are thicker than toothpaste and cannot be used without addition of water. Plaka type paints are thinner but also need dilution. For many purposes you also need to mix the colours to get the right shade.

The diluted paint should be so thick that one layer of it will cover a pencil line on a white paper. It should also be so thin that it flows out and doesn’t make ridges. If you have mixed a special shade which you want to use again, put it in a small sealed container. But avoid this if you can. When diluted paint has been left unused for a few hours, the pigment will sink to the bottom so you need to stir it thoroughly before you use it the next time. It’s best to paint everything that should be in that shade at once. The second best thing is to throw away any leftover paint and mix new the next time you work, though it may be difficult to get an identical shade.

Never dilute the paint in the original container. Adding water will make the pigment separate itself from the glue. The pigment will sink to the bottom of the bottle and lie there as a hard muck, very difficult to stir up evenly. Instead, mix up a small quantity of paint for the work you are doing, and discard anything that’s left over when you finish for the day.

Mixing colours

Paints of the same brand and type are usually intermixable. Always take care not to compromise the integrity of the original colours. If you stir the red paint with a stick that has half a drop of yellow on it, the red will no longer be quite the same.

Put a small blob of each paint that you want in the mixing vessel and add some drops of water. Stir with a #3 or #4 flat brush and make sure you squash all the little blobs of thick paint. If you need to add more undiluted paint, put a blob on the wall of the vessel and gradually squash it into the diluted paint. If you simply drop the blob into the mixture, you may end up with a lump of undiluted, undissolved paint lying invisibly on the bottom, which may suddenly change the tincture if you happen to touch it with the brush while painting.

To see what a mixture really looks like, paint a square inch with it on a piece of scrap paper and wait for it to dry. It usually becomes a little lighter when it has dried. Adding black or white will not only make the colour darker or lighter, but will also make it less intense and more “greyish”. This may be useful in some cases, because unmixed paints are often very bright, almost garish.

Most shades are easy to mix, but some may present problems. Purple, for example, is a mix between red and blue. But you must use a red colour that doesn’t contain any yellow. The red paint used in the middle ages was “vermilion” which contains some yellow. If you mix it with blue, you will get brown. For purple, use “carmine” red instead.

Always wipe the lid and the upper edge of your paint bottles with tissue before closing them. Otherwise, you will get deposits of dried paint along the lid and bottle edge. Fragments of this will fall down into the paint and make it uneven and crunchy. Deposits of dry paint may also cause the bottles to be untight and let in air.

To keep the paint fresh (especially important with gold paint), you can keep the bottles standing upside-down. This will prevent air from getting in.

Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Illuminating a Document

Traditionally, the word “illumination” only refers to decoration with gold leaf, but in our time it is used rather loosely, to mean any decoration. Note that illumination is not the same thing as illustration: the pictures aren’t there to make the text more intelligible, but to make the page nicer to look at. Illuminations don’t need to depict the contents of the text. They should, of course, be made in medieval style if you are making a medieval-styled document.

What you will do is probably heraldic shields, acanthus leaf or Celtic knotwork borders, and other ornaments. An absolute minimum is an illuminated initial. You have probably seen examples of medieval illumination which can be truly impressive. At the same time, there were reactions against the extravagances of illumination even in the middle ages. St Bernhard (in the early 12th century) thundered against the vanity and waste of effort: “What is the purpose of all this? Those unclean apes… those half-men… those fighting knights… those hunters winding their horns”. There are other examples of vitriolic monastic protests against the too-rich and too-profane ornamentation in churches and manuscripts.

We may not agree with St Bernhard, but we should remember that the most important part of a scroll is the text. Illuminations are there to make the text more beautiful to look at. They should never become so big or elaborate that they make the document into a painting rather than a text. In the Middle Ages, calligraphy and illumination were often done by different people. The scribe wrote, and the illuminator embellished. We can also employ this system. If you love painting ornaments but hate writing, you can make a deal with someone who loves to write but doesn’t paint. Or vice versa. But of course, your satisfaction will be greater if you do both things yourself.

Which comes first?
In the later Middle Ages, when scroll production had become a team work between illuminators and calligraphers, it was the calligrapher who did his work first. He would leave space for initials and other illuminations, and often he would use a diluted ink or a lead point to write instructions for the illuminator. Most calligraphers also do the text before the illuminations. This is because it’s so easy to make a mistake when you write. If you just have the text and something goes wrong, you can throw it away and start again. But if you have spent maybe ten, twenty hours or more on the illuminations, it will really hurt to throw it away.

On the other hand, I find that it’s more difficult to adapt illuminations to text than the other way around. Text can easily be made bigger or smaller by varying character size, line spacing and wording. Illuminations determine the balance and layout of the scroll and are more difficult to adapt. A diligent artist will of course plan everything ahead and make a dummy scroll where everything fits into place. Not being quite that diligent, I usually begin by doing a detailed pencil version of the illuminations. Then I write the text, and last, I paint the illuminations. This will at least save some work in case a disaster occurs while I’m writing.

In order to be sure that my text fits into the available space, I usually write a not-so-carefully done version of the text on a piece of scrap paper, using the same pen, line spacing etcetera that I intend to use on the real document. This shows me the general size of my text area, so I can know if something needs to be bigger or smaller.

Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Illumination Equipment

A whole lot of things are needed in addition to what you use for calligraphy: paint, brushes, vessels for mixing paint, a pair of compasses, technical drawing pens etcetera. This file will give you some hints about inexpensive stuff. It does not, however, teach such advanced things as making paint from natural pigments, or applying gold leaf.

Paint

The simplest way to put colour on an illumination is to use felt-tip markers. But don’t! The pigments aren’t good enough, and will fade or darken very fast. I have seen a brilliant green turn to almost black in a matter of months! DON’T use felt tip markers, especially not the water soluble kind.

Another simple way is to use crayon pens. These colours are more durable, but they still won’t do. It’s almost impossible to produce an even, smooth surface with them. The appearance of the illumination will not be authentic. You can use crayon pens for mending little errors on almost-finished illuminations.

The only colours that are good enough are water soluble, opaque colours which you apply with a brush. This is the type of paint, often called “gouache”, that was used in the middle ages. I use something called “Pelikan Plaka” which comes in little glass jars. I’m not sure if you can get this in America. It’s water soluble but hardens and becomes virtually waterproof when it dries. This paint is easy to work with and will last many years. A friend of mine has a painting in Pelikan Plaka on his wall which is some 30 years old and hasn’t deteriorated at all.
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Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Hyphenation and flourishes

At school you were taught that hyphenation has to follow certain rules. Bad hyphenation can make the text difficult to read, or cause mist-akes and misunderstandings; a sportscar could become a sport-scar. But in calligraphy, we want to make all lines equally long, so that the field of text has straight margins on both sides. This means you can’t employ the rules too strictly. Make as legible hyphenations as you can, but don’t let legibility destroy your beautiful text field.

If you are getting near the end of a line and you notice that there is a risk you may have to make a bad hyphenation, you can fill out the last part of the line with flourishes - something that looks like letters from a distance, but really isn’t.

Flourishes can also be used to beautify your text. They are usually placed as protrusions from the tall stems. Many medieval documents have extra-long stems with flourishes on the first line of text. But don’t overdo it, and avoid excessive use flourishes inside the text.

Finish: erase!

When all the text has been written you wait until the ink has dried. Then you wait a bit more, because it takes longer than you think. Then take your eraser and carefully remove all the pencil lines from your paper. Admire your work, be glad, see how nice it looks!
Correcting errors
What happens if you are writing an important document and you make a mistake? Correcting errors is difficult but not impossible. Remember that the general look of the document is more important than the individual words and letters. Remember also that spelling was optional in the Middle Ages. Real medieval scribes also made mistakes. Words that happened to be left out could be written at the bottom of the page, and the illuminator might then, for example, paint a rope around them and some figures standing where the words belonged, pulling at the rope.

If I really mess up and need to correct errors in the text, here is my standard procedure:

1. Take out a sharp modeling knife with a round blade and carefully scrape off most of the ink. It’s impossible to write on a surface that has been scraped this way.

2. Next, mix a paint that has exactly the same shade of white as the paper. Tipp-ex can be used, but it’s too stark white for most quality papers, and it’s difficult to write on. I use white gouache, with some yellow in it to get the right shade.

3. Paint over the error several times, until the paint covers all traces of the error.

4. Polish the painted surface with a small piece of fine sandpaper until it’s flat and even, and write new text on that.

Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Calligraphy hints

Concentration

Even a fumbling calligrapher can achieve good results by concentrating. An efficient trick is to hold your breath while you draw a line or write a letter. This increases attention and prevents unwanted body movements which may affect your hand. Don’t fill your lungs as if you were going to blow up a balloon, just stop breathing for a couple of seconds. Don’t sit with your legs crossed. Don’t lean your head on your free hand, but sit up straight. And never write while there are other people seated at - or even standing near - your table!

Tall letters

Some minuscules are “low”: a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z. Others are “tall”: b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, y. The guiding lines are meant to denote the height of the low letters. But how far above the guiding line should you extend the tall letters? This depends on which language you are writing in. The fewer tall letters you have, the taller you can make their stems. Latin has rather few tall letters, so do other roman languages. English has somewhat more of them. If there are too many tall stems, the visual impression will deteriorate. So keep your stems just a little less than twice as tall as a low letter. (Note that the letter “t” can be made considerably lower than that, while the letter “l” will often look better if it is slightly taller than “b” and “d”.)

When you use a broad nib to produce big text, or if there is a lot of space between the lines, you may need a separate guiding line to limit the height of the tall letters. Majuscules which stand at the beginning of a word should be slightly lower than the tall stems, otherwise they will dominate too much over the rest of the word.

Vertical guiding lines

It is also very important to make all vertical lines vertical. If they lean (for italics), they should all lean equally. Any letter which is not aligned will stand out to the viewer. A good thing is therefore to draw a few vertical guiding lines with you pencil, about one inch apart, to help you orientate “up”. This is particularly important if your letter size is big.

Angle of the nib to the writing line

A right handed person will automatically hold the pen so that the writing edge of the nib forms an angle of about 30-45 degrees to the writing line. In most cases, this is quite correct. It’s important that you keep this angle constant. Don’t turn the pen! Once you have started writing a character with a certain angle, you should keep this angle throughout, so that the “exit line” will have the same angle as the “entrance line”.

In some scripts it is not wrong to turn the pen. If you examine certain historic originals, you will find that the artist has indeed turned the pen on purpose, to achieve a special effect. Or he may have pressed it harder onto the surface in some places, forcing the nib apart to get a broader line. Insular minuscules often have such effects, where for example the stems of letters may be slightly thicker at the lower end. But it is very difficult to both move the pen correctly over the paper, and at the same time turn it between your fingers. And those scripts that need such tricks are a bit special in other respects, too. I suggest you leave them until you are ready to learn advanced techniques.

Choose an angle that suits you. The general rule is that a broad, round style (like Carolingian minuscule) should be written with 30 degrees and a narrow, tall style (like Blackletter) with 45 degrees. The most extreme styles are uncials and insular majuscules, which should be written with an angle of zero degrees, i.e. the writing edge of the nib should be parallel to the writing line. This is greatly facilitated by using a nib that has been cut at an angle so you don’t need to use a different hand position.

Holding the pen

The pen can be held at different angles to the writing surface. A higher angle (more vertical pen) gives better precision and detail, while a lower angle increases your reach (you don’t need to move your hand so often), and may give you a safer control over the pen. According to Marc Drogin, the medieval scribes held their pens almost at a right angle to the paper. Experiment! Don’t squeeze the pen too hard. This will give you writing cramp, and your letters will look clumsy.

Serifs

Serifs are the small finishing lines at the top and bottom of stems. These are made with a couple of extra strokes, after writing the letter. Serifs contribute to the beauty of the letters and also provide the calligrapher with an opportunity to adjust the height of stems that are a little too short.

Protect your paper!

Fingerprints on the writing surface are a mortal sin! Woe unto thee if thou as much as touches the paper with thy clammy fingers! Thou shalt weep and gnash thy teeth until the end of time, and thy documents shall be thrown in the eternal trash can. Your fingerprints contain grease and moisture which will penetrate the paper and dissolve the fibres. When ink is applied on the fingerprint, it will run in all directions and produce a nasty blob. This is RULE ONE: Always have a protective piece of scrap paper under the part of your hand which rests on the writing surface!

I cannot give you more help than this concerning how the individual letters are written. If you want more detailed instructions on the various scripts, try the excellent book Medieval Calligraphy” by Marc Drogin. This is simply The Book. It contains detailed analyses of how to write different scripts, and is a great help for every scribe who wants to advance himself. But no matter how good instructions you get, you cannot learn by reading only. You also need to write, to practise. It’s hardly possible to overstress the importance of practising the characters. In spite of that I have been doing calligraphy for several years, I often have to go back and practise letters again. After a time, natural laziness and inattention makes my letters deteriorate, and I must go back and look at the originals again.

Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Calligraphy Preparations

Now that you have the necessary equipment, it’s time to start practising. First of all, you must prepare a writing surface on the paper. For this you need a sheet of common typewriter or drawing paper, a ruler and a pencil. The document can be oriented in two different ways: “vertical” or “horizontal". (Some people call it “portrait” and “landscape”, respectively.) Most documents in the middle ages were horizontal, but we are going to do it vertical since this is what most of us are used to.

Margins

We begin by doing the margins. For practise purposes we can take a shortcut: using the breadth of the ruler (rulers are usually around 2 inches broad or a little less). Put the ruler on the paper so that one of its sides lies along one of the longer edges of the paper. Draw a thin pencil line along the other side of the ruler. You now have a margin which is as broad as your ruler - simple and fast because you don’t need to measure anything.

Repeat the process on the other long edge of the paper, and at the top. The margins we are making here are only a text field, for writing in. When making an actual document, you will have illuminations as well, and these don’t have to stay strictly within a rectangular field, as long as you leave enough space along the edges to allow for framing. Thus, the text field on a real scroll will probably be smaller than this one, to leave room for ornaments.

Line spacing

Now you have to decide what line spacing you want. This depends on how big your characters are - and several other things. The broader your pen, the bigger your characters will be. There is an ideal character size for every nib, but you can increase or decrease it about 15% and still make good-looking letters. When you have made up your mind about the character size, you have a minimum line spacing which is equal to the height of the tallest characters plus a fraction of an inch, so the lines of text don’t overlap.

Writing with the absolute minimum line spacing will produce a text that appears tightly crammed into the writing surface. This is certainly medieval since they often did that to save parchment. But if you increase the line spacing, the document will be easier to read. It’s really a matter of taste. Some scribes use very wide line spacing to provide room for flourishes or just to produce a more “airy” look, or to fill up the surface when there is little text.

There is an infinite number of variations to these factors. How much text is there? You can vary this by choosing longer or shorter wordings. How large is the document? How much space will you set aside for illuminations? Do you like the letters tightly packed or thinly spread? Which nib do you prefer? Look at medieval samples to see the right proportions. It’s much easier than trying to develop some sort of mathematical formula for nib width/ letter size/line spacing ratios. I prefer writing over measuring and calculating, don’t you?

But for the purpose of practise, we will use the 1/16 inch (1.5 mm) nib and a line spacing of 3/4 inch (ca 19 mm). This will give us pretty much space. Start at the top margin and put little pencil dots along both long margins this distance apart. Connect the dots opposite each other, and you will have writing lines. Don’t press too hard, you are going to erase all pencil lines later. And don’t fill the whole page with lines - there should always be space at the bottom.

You also need guiding lines which tell you the height of the low letters. In this case, the guiding lines should be 1/4 inch (6 mm) above each writing line. Mark up with dots like the writing lines. If you have a transparent ruler with scales at 90 degree angle to the drawing edge, you can get off with less work. You don’t need to make little dots along the side margins for writing lines or guiding lines, and then connect these. Instead, you simply turn the paper so the top margin is closest to your body, start from the top margin and use the angled scales to measure out the lines, proceeding each time from the previous line.

Do the writing lines first, then turn the paper 180 degrees, begin at the bottom line and do the guiding lines.

Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Calligraphy: Miscellaneous

Rulers

You need two rulers: one at least 20 inches long for cutting up large sheets and for drawing guiding lines on the documents, and one shorter which is less clumsy to handle, for details. I prefer a transparent plastic ruler which has measurements not just on the drawing edge, but also at right angles to the edge on several places. Those extra scales at right angles makes it much easier to draw writing lines.

Writing table

You can write at your desk without any special arrangements. But a writing surface that leans toward you may be an advantage. This is also what the medieval scribes used. Some art suppliers sell “screw-on” telescopic legs which you can mount on any board and which allow you to adjust the angle to your taste. Good lighting is essential. I use a desk light of 100 Watts, mounted on the left side (because I’m right handed).

Miscellaneous

You also need a pencil and a soft white plastic eraser. Pencils come in several degrees of hardness, usually termed H for hard and B for soft. H5 is super-hard, HB is medium, and B5 is very soft. You want a soft type (B2 is about right) so that it makes a visible line without denting the paper. Medieval scribes intentionally dented their parchment, because they didn’t have our types of pencils. But I prefer not to, in case I change my mind. Soft pencils are also easier to erase.

Soft white plastic erasers are good for most purposes, but some scribes find even these to be too abrasive. If you are erasing over a surface painted with a matt paint, the plastic erasers tend to burnish the surface and make glossy spots. There is something called a “kneaded” eraser, a sort of soft grey rubbery mass that you can buy at art supply shops. If you are really keen on preserving the surface of your paper, you might try this. The kneaded type of eraser is slightly sticky, so you can just apply it to the pencil marks a few times, instead of rubbing back and forth.

A sharp, thin knife for cutting large sheets of paper can be handy. Don’t use scissors, it’s almost impossible to cut straight with them.

Tissue for wiping the pen.

A whetstone or a piece of emery or sandpaper #000 to sharpen the nibs.

One very useful item is the “Ames Lettering Guide”. It greatly facilitates drawing guiding and writing lines. This is a transparent piece of plastic with a small disc which can be rotated inside a frame. The frame and the disc have several little holes where you can put a pencil tip. By turning the disc you can set the height of the small letters in relation to the size of the capitals. You then place the guide along the edge of a ruler, put a pencil through one of the holes, and slide the guide along the ruler. Since there are many holes, you can draw several lines by sliding the guide back and forth, without moving the ruler. The guide comes with complete instructions and costs only around $2.00

Our ‘from the Archives’ series documents many excellent articles that have be removed from the web. The work is while not our own is worthy of yours and our attention and we do not want to see such a good body of work lost. If you are the legal copywrite owner and wish to have a piece from the archive removed please do get in touch.

This series by Åke Eldberg is meant to be a brief overview of Calligraphy and illustration unfortunately some of the original pages have been lost and as such certain pages were truncated.

Calligraphy Equipment: Paper

Most medieval manuscripts were written on parchment or vellum. Paper appeared in the 1300’s, but was considered inferior and would not have been used for important documents. Parchment is a perfect writing material. During the manufacturing process, the surface becomes slightly fluffy. When you write on it, the pen depresses the fluff and forms a “channel” where the ink stays. This makes for excellent detail, perfect serifs and thin lines. Parchment will also last, so all your mistakes will be preserved for remote posterity.

If you really want parchment, it can be bought from Faulkiners Fine Papers in London. They have everything you may need for calligraphy and book binding. However, the price of real parchment is prohibitive for most of us. The same goes for vellum. So we usually have to make do with paper. For practising, use ordinary drawing paper or typewriter paper. Cheap white drawing paper, such as they use in schools, is also good for practise. The paper should not be too glossy, nor too absorbing (like stencil paper). A soft surface makes it easier to write. Some photocopy papers may be difficult to write on because the surface is too hard and it’s difficult to get the right ink flow - it’s like writing on marble. A too soft surface will absorb so much ink that it dissolves the paper. If the edges of your characters are unclear or uneven, you are probably using a too soft paper.

A higher quality is needed when you are producing a real work of art. There is something called “calligraphy paper” or “parchment paper” which has been treated to look like parchment or very old paper. It is yellowish and veined. It’s very stylish and looks nice. But opinions vary on wether you should use it. Some scribes think parchment paper looks nice. It makes our documents look like what we expect real medieval scrolls to look like. The “patina” improves the general impression of the document. And the darker background helps to hide small mistakes. Others say: Your work should be a gleaming new work of art - not some mouldering relic. Another reason not to use “parchment pads” is that they won’t last. The quality isn’t good enough, and you never know what chemicals they have used to dye it - stuff that might even erode your work. Remember, you are putting many hours of work into this scroll, so you want it to last. I use white, 100% cotton or rag paper of 150-300 grammes weight (per square meter), preferably acid free. White because it’s neutral. Cotton or rag because it’s durable and of even quality. Acid free isn’t strictly necessary, but I recommend it because you don’t want residue acid to eat your ink and turn your gold paint green. Water color paper is excellent if you can find one with a reasonably smooth surface. Many water color papers have rough surfaces and are almost impossible to write on. My favorite paper is “Fabriano Artistico Satinata”, an Italian papter which is sold in large sheets (22 x 30 inches) and has a smooth surface.

The price of high quality paper may surprise you, but it’s worth it. Apparently, the “acid free” feature is what really brings the cost up. You can do without it if you aren’t paranoid about chemicals. I am.

Since you are going to paint on most scrolls, it is an advantage to buy your paper in pads, not single sheets. Pads are usually glued at the edges and will stay flat. Single sheets may get warped by the moisture in the paint. There are ways to prevent this, but the process is rather complicated. Using pads is much easier.