Monday, February 1, 2016


Coloring My Medieval Art


Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries have created an event called Color Our Collections set up for February 1 to 5. They've put together a coloring book of images of popular art from their collection. But don't feel restricted by just those images. They've suggested that art enthusiasts can color any of the images available online from their collections. The event calls for people to put their colored artwork on Twitter tagged with #ColorOurCollections Feb 1 to 5.

I decided to do image 5 from their coloring book. The original medieval manuscript is here: Auct. 4Q 2.15, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, Lucain, Suetone, et Salluste [French] folio a2 recto.

This was a dream exercise. After months of studying medieval manuscripts, I could pretend to be a scribe coloring in a colophon in a parchment manuscript.

Here's the black-n-white image.



Here's my colored image.

2 comments:

Merrian said...

I have lots of colouring books gifted to me. I need better motor control than I have to attempt some of them. I am looking forward to the M&B colouring book :) I really like your colour choices in your medieval lettering. I have a tapestry book that converts mefieval pics into stitching guides. I love looking at the pictures

Keira Soleore said...

Thank you for visiting!

I've been watching the rise of adult coloring books with a lot of interest. I've always wanted to be the person who colored these complicated mandalas, but feared I wouldn't have the creativity to make good color choices, nor the patience to do intricate stuff. I'm afraid the former is still true (I did this medieval art twice) but I find that I enjoyed getting those fine-tipped gel pens out and working on the minute stuff all over the paper. At times, it was almost meditative.

Hope you'll get into your coloring more. I'd love to see what you do with your tapestry pieces. The real ones I've seen are so intricate!