Illuminated capitals

This is the font which started off the whole process, as I wrote at the beginning, the idea of a range of mediaeval illuminated capitals I could use at short notice, without having to scan or draw something specially.

And since none of the programmes I normally use could make a sensible vector version of the bitmap picture, it's also what started me looking at Illustrator ... and the beginning of a fateful love affair.

As we all know, A is for Acanthus; and for those of us who didn't know, SpellCatcher's dictionary tells us it's a "prickly Mediterranean herb".

You can see in the next chapter what it looked like when I tried to get the various programmes to trace vectors automatically from the pixels of this picture.

Once I'd finally given that up as a bad job, and accepted the time it would take to trace it by hand, it was actually quite enjoyable: you can click on the thumbnails to see the various stages ...