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a different sacred page.”

The illumination took her 60 to 80 hours, she said.

Moore adds illuminations to

vellum pages after scribes calligraph them using hundred-year-old carbon-based ink, leaving a portion of each page for Moore’s artistry.

She said vellum is “magic stuff,” and different to work with than other media. It can be made of the skin of different animals, but for this project is the skin of cattle, because of the scale of the sheets.

The skins are stretched thin, then scraped and “scrunched,” a type of sanding that makes their surface perfect for writing and painting, Moore said.

“Vellum has such an interesting quality because it is part of a living being, and so the tactile quality is unlike any paper you could make,” she said. Vellum also lasts for hundreds of years.

“Lots of early manuscripts were completely erased; all the words and images were scraped off them, and they were reused,” Moore said. “The beauty of vellum is you can scrape off an error.”

In the case of a larger error, such as omitting lines of text, scribes have to get more creative.

In one instance, a scribe missed four lines on a page, but had no intention of scraping off half the page and redoing it, so he put the lines at the end of the page. He then drew a little man with a hook and a fishing line, “pulling” the lines up to their correct place in the text.

“There’s a historical basis for that,” Moore said.

Prior to moving to Vashon in 2005, Moore had been living in Cleveland, working as the art director for the lettering design group at American Greetings.

“I think of a card as a really tiny accessible book,” she said. “It usually has words, imagery, a message to convey, and one person hands it to another or sends it to another, and it is an accessible object.”

Her husband Don Glaister, also a book artist, said he supports her work on the St. John’s project.

“I think it’s lovely; I think it’s wonderful,” he said. “It’s an important project they’re working on.”

Moore’s first illumination assignment for the St. John’s Bible was to introduce the Last Judgment. The artistic directors of the project told her to emphasize “brightness of possibility” rather than the “gnashing of teeth,” and her finished painting truly glitters with countless mosaic squares in many shades of gold.

The painting was inspired by the Basilica de San Marco in Venice, Italy — a glittering, golden church built in the Byzantine style.

The St. John’s Bible is being bound in seven separate volumes, because it would be too heavy and nearly impossible to bind the two-foot tall book in one piece.

“The technical demands of reproducing something like this are really high,” Moore said. “They need to find a bindery that’s capable of binding two-by-three books. We’re going to have to invent whatever we do. Nobody is set up and equipped to bind something of this scale.”

Moore has completed 11 illuminations thus far. The six scribes completed illuminations in 2006, eight years after they began — “they’re really fast,” Moore said. The illuminators have not yet completed their paintings but will within a few years.

“Every book I’ve ever made has changed my viewpoint and changed my understanding of something in the world,” Moore said. “The scale of this book is just so huge that it’s been illuminating on many levels.”