Medieval Scribe

I used to make a lot of characters like this one. I still find them saved among photos. It was a way to stay creative using different tools. In the end I found that I was using a small, red sable, pointed brush for most of my drawings because I could get infinite line widths.You might be surprised to know that the medieval scribes stood when they wrote the magnificent manuscripts and their writing surfaces were inclined 60º (sixty degrees) leaving nothing to lean on. There would be a room or "cell"filled with scribal monks who listened to a reader and then wrote the sentence he just spoke. This procedure went on until the bible or a manuscript was finished and was then turned over to artists whose job it was to make line endings that filled the space left blank when the sentence didn't go to the end or to the right margin. If you needed ten bibles then you had ten scribes with equal skills at making ink, cutting quill pens and shaping them and preparing either vellum or parchment (animal skins) to be used as pages like paper. [Read see more]