French Book Of Hours

A facsimile of a french book of hours I did in '94. It's from the gothic era. I thought it might be interesting enough to upload it here. I scanned it in four parts, hence the shadow in the middle.

I had a reference, copied it (I did NOT trace it) with pencil on normal paper and tried to capture the old look by "aging" the paper. The text I copied freehand with a quill and real sepia ink. The thin red guiding lines are like in the original. The monks wrote on them too. It is latin with many abbreviations and I can only read and understand a bit of the whole thing.
The decoration I painted with acrylics and gilded the illumination with wafer-thin sheets of 24 carat gold, underlayed with a thick laquer to create a smoother surface.
Real gilding is much more difficult, has to be polished with an agate... I took the easy way!
The notches in the middle are supposed to show where the book was sewed together once. Many old illuminations have these holes.
The original was not finished either and showed the underlying sketch on the right side which I found rather interesting, hence I copied both pages as they were...

Size: app. 40cm high and 25cm wide per sheet.