This German art student, Benjamin Harff, decided, for his exam at the Academy of Arts, to do something only slightly ambitious — to hand-illuminate and bind a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. It took him six months of work. He hand-illuminated the text which had been printed on his home Canon inkjet printer. He worked with a binder to assemble the resulting book.
Wow. This makes me feel like I should do something productive today.
Ohhhh, okay, so he didn’t *write* the text, it was printed on a modern printer and then he illuminated it. As a scribe myself, that makes much more sense and also helps me feel a lot less inadequate! I was pretty sure it would have taken him *years* to actually write *and* illuminate the book. I’m not at all trying to downplay the extent or quality of his work, just setting into context that he took on a human sized project rather than a superhuman one.
Beautiful, beautiful work.
