MARK Begins with a Mosaic and a Manuscript

#byzantineart #manuscript #greeklettering #calligraphy #page layout

Lets begin looking at Mark with some Byzantine ART ! This post will also be of interest to calligraphers designers and typographers for the use of Greek letters so please scroll down!

First a page from a Byzantine manuscript 

Yes the Orthodox churches had a tradition of illumined manuscripts too!

I also picked this image because its an excellent and interesting example of design. 

I love the way the scribe has moved the iota up next to the gamma so that both words are balanced on the page and we also get a look at what sort of reading and writing desks  scribes used.

And here's how a mosaic artist dealt with lettering on a curved area.

Same letters but "heavier" and "bold" to make them stand out ! 

Next weekend more Mark and midweek perhaps Athena's owls.

Parchment / Paper with Greek lettering experiment

#gnwthiseauton #knowyourself #parchment #paper

So do you think this looks more like its was "written" on parchment or paper?

Yes I've been experimenting in Inkscape again this time with combining filters so I get an effect like sepia ink of parchment or paper.

I filled a rectangle with a texture and another that changed its edges to look rougher and then separately in another layer I combined a color edit with two other filters.

One drawback is though that I had to enter each separate letter individually to take full advantage of Inkscapes capacity to manipulate vector svg objects and add filters over it. Its slower and only useful for short quotes!