Hands and Fonts for Scribal Work... (SCA)
I don't know if I have mentioned it on this site, but I have been working on scroll blanks for Northshield since Pennsic last year. I took the beginning scribal track at Pennsic, did some research this year and last, and contacted Northshield in August. (Everyone has been really amazing about helping and passing on good advice-- it's so nice to have people help who don't even know me and could have just as easily made me figure everything out the hard way.) I have mostly finished a scroll and I have bits done for several others, but I have been trying to prioritize/ organize things lately to finish everything a little more quickly. I'm going to try and post my progress on here as I go, but obviously I'm not the best at keeping up with Livejournal. At the very least, I will put a link to our family blog and post it on there. ANYWAY- On with it!
I am currently working on a bar and ivy piece that is based on several pieces for the Duke of Berry and Catherine of Cleves. Basically I went through some of my stuff from Aethelmearc's Beginning Scribal Track that I took at Pennsic and decided that I wanted to first attempt a bar and ivy piece. Then I tried to find everything I could about bar and ivy and took elements that could have been in the same piece and evened out the layout some,etc.
At the time I traced everything on to perm., I thought that someone else would have to do the calligraphy. It turns out that I will be able to do the calligraphy as well, so now I am trying to figure the best way for me to do it. I have done calligraphy in the past, however, I am going to kick myself if the spacing is off or I make a mistake because I'm out of practice. One suggestion was to find a font similar to the hand that I will use and type out what I would like on the scroll. Adjust the size and spacing to the parameters of the artwork. Then use my light table and write everything using the type as a guide. Great idea.. so where to begin..
I have searched high and low for a specific font that works and in the end, I have found a ton of fonts, but none that seem to work. Every time I find a font that has a letter or two that work, there are a lot of others that do not. So I thought about just finding each letter in different fonts. Time consuming, but at least it would look right. Right? WRONG. Resizing different fonts causes it to look awful because the letters just aren't going to match up the same. The hand that I'm using is a gothic blackletter. Some people call it batarde, some blackletter, some gothic, some lettre batarde... no one can agree upon a name. In the SCA, I often find it is called Gothic Black Letter and it is very commonly used. Surely someone has a font.. Any suggestions out there?
*** UPDATE: I did find this site to be helpful. I found it right after I posted.. maybe I just needed a little luck! http://www.shepherd.edu/englweb/fonts/