The Deer's Cry

The Deer's Cry has always been one of my favorite pieces of calligraphy, and over the years I've collected images of maybe 15 or 16 of the most famous pages from it. Archibald Knox started the work in 1914 and continued working on it for the rest of his life. It's an amazing rendition of Patrick's Breastplate, or the Deer's Cry, a midieaval poem often attributed to Patrick.

For Archibald Knox's 150th birthday (and maybe the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the project) The Manx museum actually posted the entire thing online this month--including the unfinished pieces. Unfortunately the pictures are kind of underexposed, so they're pretty dark.

The Christ images are my favorites and three of the completed ones would make a nice set with the unfinished Christ Before me. Cause I'm a nerd and stuff I tried to fix the Christ Before Me image. Because it was a pencil drawing and the fold of the binding made the left side of the image really dark, it didn't work. As the drawing was actually complete, my obsessiveness kicked in and I reworked it.

Here is the redone version. As noted, they'd make a nice set:

 I wonder what colours he would have used. I don't think it would be crazy to think it would probably be similar to the others, but still unique. Too bad he didn't finish it . :(  There are only maybe ten lines uncompleted. I really love that each section has a continuity of design and unfortunately this section is the one where most of the missing lines are. "Christ in me" is wider and looks less like the other four, but is still also beautiful.

Mem was all "you should finish" as if I don't suck compared to Archibald Knox and would ruin it.