Alice in... Manuscript.. Land...

Not exactly the best quality photos, but here are my manuscript pages.

Here are a couple of the pages I used for inspiration:

The Book of Kells

I absolutely fell in love with The Secret of Kells. I wanted to wait to write this until after I had watched it again and really been able to pay attention to the details. The depth of every design in the movie is breathtaking, you can see knotwork and ancient Celtic symbols worked into the trees and plants, drawings resembling manuscripts surrounding the characters, colors that remind of the Book of Kells, etc. One subtle thing that I really loved was how many scenes were flat, that is the landscapes and perspective was laid out like a page out of a book, the style was extremely illustrative and hearkened back over and over to the original manuscripts. Even the characters themselves were often a modernized version of the people in the manuscripts. The animals, especially the wolves, looked like they were straight out of the book as well. Another thing was that people and objects would tend to be contained within shapes, such as if you saw a group of people, they were usually all contained within the shape of the person in the back of the group. That really reminded me of some of the detailed shapes within bigger shaps in the Celtic manuscripts. All this rambling can be summed up in saying I think The Book of Kells was one of the most beautiful and inspiring pieces of animation I've ever seen.

I couldn't find much that reminded me of the Beatus manuscripts, so I opted for something that reminds of other European manuscripts. The storybooks from the openings of classic Disney princess movies! These books are very obviously directly based on medieval manuscripts. I think they're absolutely beautiful, particularly the Snow White book (which is ironic, considering that Snow White is my least favorite Disney princess). The illustration style is obviously more modern, but you can see the carpet page style illustration in the Sleeping Beauty book, and historiated capitals in all three books. I think these are a great example of a more modern take on very old European manuscripts.

Celtic inspired design

This is a t-shirt design I found based on the Celtic cross. You see this cross design with the circle and the knots in a lot of Irish churches and graveyards. I see it in a lot of tribal style designs, which seem to be pretty popular right now. There is knotwork in the cross itself and it's laid out like a piece of Celtic jewelry, with a jewel in the middle. The black and white tribal patterns in the background are like modernized versions of some of the swirled patterns we see in the Celtic jewelry and manuscripts and they echo the shape of the cross itself. Behind the cross, very faintly in the background, is a very similar pattern to some of those in the manuscripts, particularly behind the top right corner. I thought this was a pretty good example of very modern design inspired by Celtic patterns and icons.