Vegans can do [mostly] period C&I too!

 

My student is vegan and we were discussing ways to get around all of the period C&I materials that used animal products. Here are some substitutions/alternatives to common period materials that use animal products.

 

The parchment will be the one true hiccup. Paper was an entirely different thing and before that everything was on animal parchment. WAY back, papyrus was used, but (in Northern Europe at least) was quickly abandoned for animal parchment. For this, you can use pergamenata. Get the heavy weight stuff, and you can treat it like parchment. Just make sure you explain in your documentation EXACTLY why you are using pergamenata instead and demonstrate a working knowledge of parchment in period.

 

Quills can be a problem depending on to the degree to which you adhere to avoiding animal products (not a bad thing either way, but I know that people vary). If you are okay with feathers, then you don't have a problem. If you are okay with them only if they are harvested from the ground (ie: naturally shed and not plucked), you may have to get them from someone who has birds and can assure you this was the case. Difficult, but do-able. If you are not okay with using them at all, another period tool was the reed pen, cut almost the same way but from a reed. They were generally used for practice and less important documents, but they are still at least period tools. As long as you state in your documentation that you know a feather would have likely been used and why you are not using one, then you should be fine.

 

For ink, oak gall ink is likely your best bet. Lamp black was a common ink too, though it frequently requires the use of egg yolk. There are recipes without, but they vary wildly.

 

When working with dry pigments, there are two options for binder: glair and gum arabic. Glair is egg white that has been whipped and allowed to settle, collecting what settles and leaving the protein fluff behind. Glair *tends* to be earlier and gum arabic *tends* to be later, but glair makes appearances in later period too. If you don't want to use glair for a piece that would have used it in period, you can use gum arabic instead, but know that some styles don't work as well with gum arabic since gum arabic rehydrates and glair does not, which can affect the style if you're not careful. But if you are careful, and you document it properly, you should still be able to use dry/period pigments while staying reasonably period.

 

Flat gilding (laying gold with a thin mordant that takes on the texture of the page beneath it) can be done with multiple mordants. While glair and fish glue are common, so are boiled stout and garlic juice (my personal preference of all options, vegan and non-vegan). Boiled stout is literally stout boiled until it's goopy then rehydrated a little before use. Garlic juice is pureed garlic that is strained through cheese cloth, no watering down or mixing or anything. There is also synthetic mordant known as miniatum ink that works for flat gilding as well.

 

For raised gilding, there is synthetic miniatum (thicker than the ink and usually yellow). There is a period recipe for gesso that uses glair and a period-approximate that uses honey and hide or wood glue (hide glue is obviously non-vegan and wood glue can vary). The period recipe is slaked plaster, lead white, sugar candy (which can be sugar/honey candy), a pinch of bole, and glair, but honestly based on experiments, the period recipe probably had a glue in it too. The period approximate is slaked plaster, a lot of bole proportionally, hide glue OR wood glue, and honey. It just depends on what you're okay with using. And if the period and period- approximate are not okay with you, just use the synthetic modern miniatum and document it properly.

 

For burnishers, they say to use a dog's tooth, but a polished stone would have been perfectly period as well.

 

For brushers/dusters (to brush away pounce/bread--see below--without touching your page and reintroducing oils), they say to use a rabbit's foot but they would often leave a tuft of feather on their quills for this, or, if you don't use feathers, then simply using a bit of soft cloth works too!

 

Pounce was, in period, small fowl/fish bones that were allowed to sit for a while then were thrown in the fire until ash white and ground to a powder. There is some evidence of chalk and chalk- like material being ground and used as a pounce, but I haven't found anything solid (yet). There are also modern, non-animal-product pounces that act very similarly to bone pounce, however.

 

Bread is a thing I picked up from Cennini. It would have been used as an eraser to pick up and smudge lead-tin stylus lines when doing the basic sketching. However, bread recipes are so varied that you can easily justify a vegan bread recipe as an eraser, especially since they would not have necessarily used their super soft bread riddled with animal products anyway. Now that I think about it, my period-ish rye bread recipe may actually be vegan unaltered (I'll check).

 

Paint brushes are the one thing that I don't see a ton of people making on their own, but since I do, I will address them here. Period brushes would have a wood handle, animal hair bristles, and the thing that holds them together is part of the shaft of a feather. If you're okay with feathers, this should still work. If not, try wrapping with artificial sinew. It's actually worked pretty well for me in the past. If clipped animal hair is okay with you (especially if you know the animal was unharmed), then that part isn't a problem, but if so, feel free to use synthetic bristles, as long as you explain your substitution.

 

That is all I can think of for now. If you have any questions, comments, or additions, please feel free to contact me!

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