Pentiment

Oh boy oh boy, am I excited to share THIS one.

Okay. This video is age-restricted, so to watch it you’ll have to click through to YouTube… which is a shame, because it’s the announcement trailer for the most exciting game I’ve played in a long time: Pentiment.

In Pentiment, you play Andreas Mahler, an artist finishing his journeyman year in one of the few remaining monastery scriptoriums in Europe, in the early 16th century. The whole game is rendered in the style of manuscript illustrations, characters’ speech bubbles use the fonts they would have used at the time (Italians use Humanist hands, everyday people speak in Miniscule, and the very important people at the Abbey speak in Gothic… there are more delightful speech-bubble surprises, but I’ll let you discover them yourself). You access the game’s interface features through Andreas’ own book, which is full of illustrated marginalia. Perhaps best of all, you are–within time limits–free to do, or not do, whatever you want within the setting of Tassing, a small town in the Bavarian alps, and its nearby abbey.

The game reminds me of The Excavation of Hobb’s Barrow, in that there is a storyline which the game more or less forces you to follow. It’s very different from Hobb’s Barrow, though, because the choices you make affect the story going forward. A murder–actually a series of murders–that you must solve force you to decide how you’re going to spend your limited time to investigate them, and (hopefully?) bring the true culprit to light.

And that is the devil in the details of this game. You can play through the whole game without catching on to certain suspects at all. Moreover, until the end you aren’t sure whether you were right or not. There are a variety of people you can accuse of the crimes, and for each it’s possible to build up a strong enough case that they will be executed based on testimony you provide. The village is small, the abbey is smaller, so that person being alive or dead makes a big difference–both to the community and, for me anyway, to your own conscience.

Here’s a video that isn’t age-restricted, fortunately.

The age restrictions are due to a certain amount of gore–on my third playthrough, I discovered that it is possible to actually watch the executions, and there are other on-screen deaths–and to the characters discussing very matter-of-fact parts of life. I have an adolescent daughter and wouldn’t have minded playing with her, but true littles likely wouldn’t understand, and might be frightened by the gore (it is, by the way, also possible to look away during the executions, which is what I usually did).

Content-wise, the people who wrote this game truly understand all the wonderful weirdness of the 16th century, and it’s clear that they wrote the game at least partially with education in mind. The changing status of the monasteries in the early 16th century is at the forefront of the game and the characters’ minds; even the way time is reckoned changes in the course of the game. There is an anchoress, there is a Wicker Man, there is a lot of talk of old Pagan practices. There are also a number of mini-games in which you get to “practice” traditional skills like forging iron and spinning with a distaff.

Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the game–aside from the sometimes terrible consequences of your own choices–is that what you say to people matters, and the game lets you know when it matters. It’s a cold, sinking feeling when, in the middle of a long conversation, you throw out a careless response and the game throws the “This Will Be Remembered” notification at you. Eeeeeeeeek!

Anyway. Pentiment is available for Xbox and Steam, and I strongly recommend it. SUCH a great game. Hard to believe it has seen the light of day, given what the gaming industry is probably like, but I sincerely wish to see more games like it.

Forgiving myself while practicing insular majuscule

I am still practicing my lettering, and still using insular majuscule as my script of choice, because it’s what the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels are written in. In my last post about it, I expressed frustration about how my lettering just doesn’t look authentic. At the time, I pinned this down to a few tendencies about letter-shaping, which my own training in D’nealian and then in American Cursive had given me.

I am still getting better. My lettering, though still vastly imperfect, gets better every day that I practice it.

But, as I observed in a previous post, even the published calligraphers don’t manage to look completely authentic. Even they don’t reproduce those pesky letter shapes quite right.

And that, I have decided, I need to accept. In them and in myself. None of us are 10th century people, and all of us, no matter how talented we are or how much we practice, still have our own handwriting.

In college I took a class in biological psychology–maybe the most interesting class I ever took–in which the professor liked to say that any time you write your signature, no matter how you do it–with pencil or pen, on a screen, with your finger, while holding the implement with your hand or foot or mouth or butt-cheeks–that signature will be more similar to your normally-made signature than to anyone else’s. We don’t just have our own history of writing habits, we have our own particular physiology, and it affects the way we write.

So. I am still trying to emulate the script in the Book of Kells, but I am also accepting that I will probably never get there, certainly not without the same materials those scribes used (and while a quill pen might happen, I’m fairly certain vellum never will). I am myself and not someone else, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Finding watercolor equivalents for medieval pigments

Hello hello. I’m back again and still working toward the various skills & materials to make my own passable, to a modern non-specialist anyway, medieval manuscript.

I have a fine collection of Celtic decoration books by now, and I’ll be working on that soon (I played with it a little in college, so it won’t be totally new to me). I’d like to color my knots, and maybe even draw some cutesy marginalia, so I need paints of some kind.

Beginning Illumination by Claire Travers is a treasure of a book. It explains how to prepare actual vellum, mix up inks and paints, and apply gesso and gold leaf, for example. It’s a real grimoire. It includes a table of natural pigments, with the ones used by medieval painters marked with asterisks.

I am by no means up to preparing my own paints from pigments. I just want watercolors to match them. Real artist-quality watercolors often include these pigments, but getting a full set is expensive and I’m definitely not up to snuff for that yet. So I have two sets of watercolors by Prima Marketing, from their Watercolor Confections line: the Odyssey set, which has rich, bold colors, and their Woodlands set, which is designed to make it easy to paint, you guessed it, woodland scenes. Today I finally got around to swatching with them, and wow. I’ve never used anything better than elementary-student watercolors. These are very much a different beast. So saturated. So lively on the paper. Painting with watercolor is quite a sensory experience.

But on to pigments. I don’t want to include a photograph of Claire Travers’ pigment chart, because that’s her IP, but I’ll talk you through it. Though I propose what seems like the best possible substitute for each pigment, in all honestly I will probably not mix these watercolors, just use the appropriate ones as they are. That’s why I bought these fancy colors instead of just a few basics, in the first place.

White Lead: this is the white from the period, used for highlights. The only white in my sets is Calgary, so it’ll have to do.

Sepia: this is a dark brown-black derived from squid ink. Isn’t that interesting? I never knew. My watercolors include a color called Jordan, which is quite dark and browny-black, albeit with a touch of purple. It’s not a satisfactory equivalent but there’s nothing better, unless I mix Shadow with it, which I could certainly do.

Lamp-black: made from the soot that gathers inside lamps. A dark, true black. My closest equivalent in watercolor is Shadow, however I also have a bottle of India ink for my lettering. India ink is made from the carbon of burnt vines, apparently.

Burnt umber: dark brown. Bear is my nearest equivalent.

Naples yellow: a very pale, buttery yellow. I could use the barest touch of Inca + Sand Ridge in a lot of water, though this strikes me as a color for painting faces, which I’m scared to do.

Orpiment: canary yellow. No need to mix here; I think Inca, watered down, will do well. At the strength on my swatches it’s more like cadmium yellow, which is not period-authentic.

Yellow ochre: Travers lists two shades of this. They’re both brownish yellows. Cavern is very close to the darker one; Cavern with a lit of Inca might do for the paler one.

Havana ochre: what a great name. This is a warm, teddy-bear brown. Either Dubai or Cusco would do.

Burnt sienna: a darker, browner color. Still Dubai and Cusco are good candidates.

Cinnabar: ooh, I’ve heard of that. This is the closest to a nice, rich scarlet that the medieval palette has. Rome seems a little too cool. I would warm it up with something, perhaps.

Red ochre: a distinctly reddish brown. More color mixing; a healthy dash of Cusco in Rome I think.

Minium: a warm, almost orange-red. Maui should be the base, darkened and cooled with Rome.

Cochineal: to my eyes, this and carmine lake are indistinguishable when painted on darkly, but in the sheer wash (Travers shows both) the cochineal is very violet. So I vote Budapest.

Carmine lake: if cochineal is Budapest, then carmine lake has to be Foxberry.

Rose madder: this is a nice, coolish red, not very dark. Rome, watered down.

Brazil wood: this is pink when it’s pale, red when dark. I’ve finally found a use for Tokyo.

Indigo: bluejeans blue. Some of the other blues are cooler than this one, so I vote Mist.

Lapis lazuli: a real elementary-school blue. Either Stream or London.

Azurite: in a pale wash this is just the barest bit greener than lapis lazuli, but when they’re dark I can’t tell them apart. Again either Stream or London.

Woad: yeah baby. I love woad. It’s so dark that nothing here is a really good candidate. I would start with Mist and try darkening it either with Jordan or Shadow.

Verdigris: this is a lovely cool green. Pond is bang-on.

Sap green: verdant! I vote for Jamaica, whose name I smudged on the swatch card.

Green earth: darker and a little yellower than sap green. A touch of Inca in Jamaica, perhaps darkened with something.

Malachite: another delicate, cool green. I could repeat Pond, or I could carefully water down Deep Moss.

And that’s all for the pigments. I also have a palette of metallic watercolors, because I am not messing with gesso and leaf. They are the Coliro (formerly Finetec) Pearlcolors, in the Gold & Silver palette.

And these colors, unfortunately, weren’t quite as delightful as the Prima colors. Prima produced saturated payoff with the barest touch of my brush in the pans. Coliro was work. Even with two applications, having scrubbed the pans as much as I dared with my brand-new brush, the metallic is a wash rather than anything solid.

I think this is a matter of my approach. The next time I want to use these, I think I should put a lot of water in the pan and let it sit for 5-10 minutes before I try to paint anything. Calligraphers use this as metallic ink in dip pens, and it is widely regarded as one of the best if not the best metallic watercolor one can buy, so the problem is me. I just have to figure out how to handle it.

I did find that CSY, a new brand with listings only appearing last November, offers a 6-pan palette of golds and silvers, though, and since it’s cheap I ordered it. I will report when it arrives. Interestingly, the list of ingredients for this set (including honey, gum arabic, pearl powder, patience, and time) is similar to Travers’ list for her paints. Good omens!