OCR Text |
Show The lime preparation seems to have been a quick-drying preparation. If it was water based it may have been freshly burnt lime which slaked as it was stirred with water. There are pages which are smooth followed by areas showing marks made apparently by a soft fibre brush, which in turn are succeeded by areas where a spatula has been used with considerable force to level the area. Some areas have a scatter of small crackle rather like the crackle which appears on a fine ceramic gl&ze. The mechanics are of the same nature, the surface has contracted at a different pace from the underlying material. In this case either the lime-wash was slaking actively and drying itself too quickly or else the underlying skin was too absorbent and so produced a too rapid drying of the top layer. The finished surface of the whole document was not even, but still smooth enough for precise drawings to be painted on it. It has the variation of surface one might encounter on an old hand-laid drawing paper.¢^ There are a very few blots on the surface, most of them were made by the very liquid soft brown colour used in some cases for a flesh tint. These splashes have run a little. There is one in a medium blue which may have occured after the Codex was out of Mexico, since the colour is not used in the document. Some of the black outlines have small smudges caused by too much ink being on the point of the writing instrument. One page (22 D.) is damaged by water and has smeared, but this was after the painting had been completed. One notices that the ink dried rather slowly, since on two pages off-prints from adjoining pages may be seen. Where the black outline is smudged it goes over the body colours nearest to it. This is presumptive evidence that it was drawn after the painted figures had been blocked in, in colour. There are no noticeable remains of guide lines, but the workmanship of the codex is so excellent that one assumes that the original lines were probably in grey and have been almost exactly followed by the final black lines. The colours used seem to have all been water based. The red is probably cochineal, and most of the others finely powdered mineral colours probably given body by an admixture of white, though some seem to have been stains, like the sample of flesh colour which has splashed |