The Illuminated Manuscript Project: Genesis, Chapters Eleven and Twelve (NIV)

Hello, and welcome back to my illuminated manuscript of the NIV Bible, Book of Genesis. As discussed in earlier posts, this is a project that I made for myself to experiment with illuminated manuscript whilst making my way through the Bible, a traditional manuscript for illumination. I try to bring some creativity and fun into the lettering and illustrations. It's all done in a hardbound sketchbook, colored with magic marker, gel pens and colored pencil, so it's a fun little practice project. 

I have a lot of information this time, so I am going to pepper the illuminated pages throughout to liven things up. 

Last time, I mentioned the bleedthrough from the purple ink. Unfortunately, that is going to continue for a short while longer before I catch it, because of my process. I haven't discussed that yet and it might be of interest, so here is how I do the illuminated manuscript: 

First, I do several pages of lettering and line drawings with my black pen. I don't draw guidelines for the text, just let 'er rip. Most of the time, I'm pretty good about staying straight. I don't want to draw guidelines because I want to be able to burst into illumination whenever the urge hits me, and I feel like working with lines already on the paper would stifle me. 

Second, I go through and start adding color. Since I am working on both sides of the page, I use water-based marker to try to eliminate bleedthrough. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work, and sometimes I don't catch it until it has happened on several pages, hence the purple issues. That was a gel pen, by the way. Obviously, now that I have identified that as an issue, I won't use it any more.  

Last step is adding more subtle color with colored pencils. My favorite brand is Prismacolor (I have two large sets of the prized, older pencils that were under the brand name Berol), but I also use Derwent Coloursoft. I temper the rather harsh tones of the markers, add detail, shading, and color variation to the illustrations, and also add some unifying tones to the page in general with these pencils. 

As always, you can click the first picture to enlarge it and then scroll through the pages from there. 

Here is the first post, if you'd like to start at the beginning (everything else links forward from there). 

Here is the previous post (everything links backward, too. Hooray for completism!)

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