Medieval Illuminations

As well as learning how monks copied books we learned how they decorated the books with illuminations. So as another art project during the week the girls designed and completed their own illuminations. We again used the book "Across a Dark and Wild Sea" by Don Brown as well as our coloring pages as inspiration. Both of the girls began by drawing their plan on a regular piece of paper. They then recreated their work on cardstock and we added gold leaf.

 Here are the girl's finished products. Kennedy's is on the left and Reagan's is on the right. Like the monks, we concentrated on using primarily vibrant colors (blue, green, red and yellow) along with the gold leaf to enhance the look of our illuminations.

 Because Reagan didn't follow the directions she became somewhat frustrated with this project and ended up getting quite a bit of assistance from Tim.
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Kennedy did a fabulous job, however, and really enjoyed the process of design through completion. Kennedy's bird did crack me up a bit though. First of all she drew it entirely by herself which again impressed me. I tried and tried to convince her it would be so pretty to do the entire belly of the bird in gold leaf. She refused insisting it would not be realistic for a robin to have a gold belly. We went back and forth over this throughout the design and up until the end of her completed work. So after she insisted it would NOT be realistic to use gold for a robin's belly she went a colored her robin blue!?!?! What a little goofball! lol :) She definitely gave me a good laugh with her ever so realistic robin, which as you can see does not have an entirely gold belly...