I just finished up my assignment for the museum project, i made my exhibit on Illuminated Manuscripts, and I love medieval art and the idea of hand-making something so intricate and precious as a religious text that thousands of people come pilgrimage to just gaze at to experience the magical art itself, aswell as the idea of the monks painting and foilign each indiviudal page to be perfect.
I honestly executed the idea for my exhibit that came to mind first.
I looked at the way most museums work their manuscripts, whether real or fake, the similarities their exhibits share work really well with the manuscripts themselves , the complementary blue backgrounds, the bright downwards spotlight, the white and gold fonts and the medieval typeface titles work really well with the topic.
I wanted to do something with these elements AFTER my concepts of doing a Skyrim loading screen as my museum exhibit. Skyrim loading screens are described as a frozen, rotating 3d object or character in a liminal space with small text in the corner , they are very cool and I thought it would be a simple and clean display with an element of epic whimsy. Here are some examples:
I wanted to make it look like its a future museum using either digital 3d groahics or hovering technology to show an illuminated manuscrip tmodel. i started with creating the covers of the pages on procreate, using a manuscript text and a simple design and illustration of the virgin Mary and baby Jesus using various references to replicate an illuminated Manuscript style.
Final design, incorporating the text found here by modern calligraphy artist, Ziggiotti Ivano: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ivano-ziggiotti/6776964604
I then found a creative commons model on sketchfab of a book to UV map my illustration on:
#9 Magic Book – 3December2019 by Canary Games on Sketchfab
At this point i was already super proud of succeeding in my first time at Blender, I believe it was a good choice to use blender because i have been wanting to learn more about 3d after learning a bit of Maya. I am pretty happy with my choices in taking all that time working in the software.
Regarding the final touches in procreate and illustrator, it took a while for me to get the right feel for the typeface in the final, Universal type client was a little annoying when finding a cool medeival font, so I just went with te best one in illustrator, and complimenting it with a simpler text for the box papragraph.
References for the museum text paragraph:
Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, October 5). Illuminated manuscript. Wikipedia. Retrieved October 7, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript
Zirlin, Y. (2013). Illuminated manuscripts. In H. Bar-Itzhak, & R. Patai (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Jewish folklore and traditions. Routledge. Credo Reference: https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sharpejft/illuminated_manuscripts/0
Other:
https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/fofmedieval/book_of_kells/0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_art#Other_books
Creative References:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/9-magic-book-3december2019-4e245fa384fb486ba7bbc519bdc24464
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Loading_Screens
References for the Blog Post:
https://www.clevelandart.org/events/exhibitions/glory-painted-page/gallery-views
https://www.theledger.com/story/entertainment/local/2019/05/15/illuminated-manuscripts-on-display-at-pmoa-show-golden-age-of-handmade-books/5154779007/
https://www.folger.edu/sites/default/files/Turner-Cradles-for-Displaying-Illuminated-Manuscripts.pdf