I want to do more with illuminated letteres and this book has some good and interesting illustrations.

Very beautiful and interesting book full of visual aid and practical hints.
Very good guide for anybody who is interesting in calligraphy.

I highly recommend this book to any fine or graphic artist, even if you are not into calligraphy or have any intension of doing any artwork resembling classic illumination.

I went to art school for many years, divided my time between both fine arts and visual communication, and this book is glorious review encapsulated in between two covers. There is stuff covered that I wish I had been taught in the seven years I went to art school! Morgan's book discusses everything from different types of paper, finding the "grain" and why it is important to making one's own gesso and egg tempera paints. It discusses the difference between the many types of materials for gilding with step-by step photographed instructions, including how to pick out vellum and prepare it for your work. It warns you of pitfalls and common mistakes and how to avoid and correct them. It even discusses layout and paste-up and the importance of preliminary work and preparing your work space. The first half of the book is about tools and techniques and the second half is devoted to specific types of alphabets, their history and step-by-step photographs and instructions on their execution.

Though this book is not for a typical scrap-booker that is looking for a quick way to make fancy decorations in between batches of cupcakes, it is an almost complete curriculum for the art of illumination in a book*. It goes through advanced art techniques step by step making them easy to understand so that you feel comfortable enough to begin practicing these. It is a great primer on the tools most artists use or may have questions about including: paper, vellum, parchment, brushes, pens, gouache, watercolor, egg tempera, inks, flat gilding, raised and burnished gold, shell gold, metallic gouache and powders. It is also a great melding of the disciplines of both fine and graphic arts and thus serves as a fantastic reference to any fine or graphic artist or bookmaker.

*I say "almost complete" in that I found the sections of "Drawing the Decorated Initial" and "Placing Capitals on the Page" in Margaret Shepard's book CAPITALS FOR CALLIGRAPHY as important information that I found wanting in Morgan's book. These two books together are very good companions to one another--especially because Shepard's book goes over basic calligraphy in a bit more depth.

I have wanted to learn how to do beautiful Illuminated Letters for a few decades now....and have managed to buy a couple of 'reproduction' Bibles and such- that had a few illuminated letters in them. But nothing I found had nearly enough information to really feel like I could do more than exactly copy a given letter- and in fact the books I had told me NOTHING about how to get the effects....

Well, this book literally had my jaw on the floor when I first looked through it. I have now had a chance to really examine it. The list of materials and techniques- before you even get to the lettering part is amazing...I will likely never use 'real' calf skin vellum, but it is nice to know HOW to use it (stretching it and handling it) if I ever get really good at this.

The book covers a huge number of TYPES of illuminated letters- Gothic, Celtic, Ottonian, Romanesque, Renaissance, Neo-Classical, and more....There are very detailed step by step instructions for doing at least one letter in every style- and much more- including letter and number examples, script examples for the rest of your writing.

In short, if you have ANY interest in the subject you will want to own this book...I may just sleep with it under my pillow tonight I love it so much!!

Beginning to experienced, it does not matter, this book will fit in wonderfully with all your needs and wants. And when you're done with the book, proudly display its beauty. From illuminating capitals to writing script or learning the styles and techniques, this book has just enough of what you're looking for.