Hand Copying the Entire Manuscript

[seridane]

What a fascinating and amazing piece of work. I can sort of imagine how much work went into it, since I also “copied” a few lines at the beginning to get a feel for the script. But to copy the entire work? Phew, that’s impressive. And it turned out so beautifully, honestly!

I think some people here would be interested to know how many hours you spent on it? Just to get a rough idea of how long it takes to copy something like this.

Did you “time” it somehow?

And one more question: Did you also get the impression that it was easier to write the glyphs, how should i say:  backwards?

Roughly timed only, and all time is for a singular "foldout"? Not quite sure how to describe that. 

• The text only pages take from 30-45 minutes to copy. 
  
• The plant pages usually took about 2 hours. 
  
• The Nymph pages and "Recipe" pages were probably in the 1.5 hour range. 
  
• The Rosette map was easily 8 hours just for the line work - haven't started painting it yet.
  
• The Astronomy pages were probably 2 hours for the zodiacs or anything else with all of the tiny star-nymphs - I'm guess wildly here because the sheer amount of tiny little naked ladies (538) turned into a bit a a marathon over the last three months.
  
• Maybe an hour a piece for the non-nymphs Astronomy rosettes.
  

I'm probably underestimating all of those times, so 400 hours of work on the short end. Possibly 500 hours - I could easily be underestimating all of that by 30 minutes a page.
Also, there are transcription errors in my copy. It was incredibly easy to get lost in the Voynichese and repeat a part I already copied, or skip a line. If I'd gone back and redone those places, I can't even imagine. I've left all of those transcript errors and spilled paint and ink drops in place. 

I've never attempted writing any of the script backwards - the idea of that hurts my brain   I have some videos I took of some pages while I was working them. The script wrote incredibly naturally for me.