Made for this year’s Artist’s Book Club, Abecedarium – each person was assigned a letter to work on for the project.
When we were first given the brief I immediately started looking at Historiated Letters and had lots of ideas for rubber stamps.
I was given the letter H and by coincidence one of the earliest known Historiated Letters was a H from the St. Petersburg Bede – Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) – 731–746 AD. There is some dispute regarding the person depicted – some say it is St. Augustine of Canterbury, but the text around the image indicates that is Pope Gregory the Great.
Initially I planned to do this in colour and even cut the colour stamps. When carving the stamp I refine the image as I go and do test prints – usually with a grey ink pad (also numbering the prints to keep track of the changes). In the end I much preferred the print from a lovely grey ink pad (Memento Luxe, Grey Flannel – Pigment Ink) printed on Somerset Satin (250gsm). I don’t know why but the colours just looked all wrong to me.
I also made a text stamp to go with the image. I researched the scripts used and found it was an Uncial script around the image. I downloaded two Uncial typefaces – one from Google (Uncial Antiqua) and one from Adobe (Rieven Uncial). I didn’t like all the letters in one so used a combination of the two which looked more like the original.
