Words for tools, materials and effects

This lesson asks you to explain in detail the terminology of the techniques, materials and tools used to make applied art works, and to understand techniques artists use to achieve certain effects. The museum offers the vocabulary of three Islamic crafts: illuminating a book, writing with a reed pen, and cutting glazed tile. Your own tools and techniques, and the effects you test, are for your class. ¹

Make a three-column list from the records: parts, tools, materials. Decide where each word belongs, and mark the words you did not know.

Choose one step from a record. Describe what the surface looks like before and after it, and name a technique you use that makes a similar change.

Illumination has its own words for the parts of a book. The record says it is the art of decorating title pages, headings, verse divisions, colophons, dedications, borders and book covers ². Norah Titley traces its origin to the simple decoration of vowel marks and of the circles separating verses in Qur'ans written by Arab calligraphers in the seventh and eighth centuries ². She notes Shiraz favouring deep maroon and Herat black ³, and Herat headings with lapis lazuli grounds ⁴.

Each term in the three records rests on a named source. Titley traces illumination to simple decoration in early Qur'ans ². The Turkish encyclopaedia defines the calligrapher's hand as writing the letters of the Arabic script according to aesthetic rules ⁵. Newcomb divides Moroccan decorative tilework into ceramic mosaic and painted tiles ^{6 7}. So each word in a glossary has a source behind it.

Titley says illumination was not confined to text pages but entered paintings themselves, on architecture, tents, saddlecloths and carpets ^{8 3}. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: is "illumination" a word for a place on the page, a technique or a style?

• Manuscript illumination: the parts of a book that were decorated, and the schools of Shiraz, Herat and Tabriz.
• Calligrapher (khattat): the reed pen, the soot ink and the hands named for their nibs.
• Zellij: cut ceramic mosaic, and inscriptions cut through the glaze.

Read Manuscript illumination, Calligrapher and Zellij. Build a glossary of ten words from them, each with a one-line meaning in your own words.