e-book TRACING THE ICONS Byzantine and Greek Images (part 1) “Sofia”

Due to numerous requests we decided to make an electronic ebook version of our
first edition of 2012 year “Tracing the icons. Byzantine and Greek images”. We wish
you success in this God-pleasing work of icon painting!
Long time ago we suggested the idea to write a book with the images of icons and
their tracings. Teaching our students, we understood that there were practically no
high quality tracings, which would be used as transparent papers and could help in
teaching. Therefore we started to trace drawings from the icons as the training aids
for our students. We hoped it would help them to work in a right direction from the
very beginning and understand drawings better.
This is supposed to be the first book in the series for tracing the icons. There you
can find the best images of the Byzantine icons. Tracing them will be useful for
beginners as well as for masters. However the photos of icons could differ in color
from the originals. Therefore we advise you to visit museums and to study colors of
icons directly on their images, since in our work we made an emphasis on tracing
the icons.
In the book there are tracings for each icon, made in black and red colors. Black
drawing lines are used for all dark colors: blue, green, dark brown and sometimes for
white. Red lines are used for yellow, red and brown shades as well as for faces and
hair. This dividing helps the artist to view his drawing better and at the same time it
does not hinder working with color.
We gave special attention to the inscriptions as well as the place of nimbuses. We
have tried to reconstruct the inscriptions (their survived parts) and have marked the
centres of nimbuses with gray color.
There are losses on some icons such as the stars on clothes of the Mater Amabilis,
illegible texts and other fragments. It is supposed that the icon painter will create the
entity of the image himself according to the painting canons.
We hope our efforts were not in vain and this book will be useful for you. We promise
to attempt to write new books in the future.

Anna Golubkova