I’m Ian Raven, and that you’re here tells me that you’ve reached this point for one of two reasons:
1. You’re horribly, horribly lost in the intertubes and you found this page.
2. You’re expecting to see what I’ve been up creatively, or what I’m working on right now.
If it’s the first reason, then you have my apologies. All you’ll find here is a collection of photos, scans, deconstructions, overly-harsh self-critique, and such. If it’s the second reason, then welcome! Here you’ll find a collection of photos, scans, deconstructions, overly-harsh self-critique, and such, dealing mainly with my SCA creative output.
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This scroll is an example of “the simple ones take the longest”. We had some trouble getting it started, because we had a completely open-ended assignment of “something for the Youth Combat tourney”, and it was not interested in telling us itself what it wanted to be. Even the text went through four of five mutations before settling on the simple, but not completely same-old, same-old form with which we ended up.
In the end, we went with my fall-back position of 14th century stylings, with a later gothic hand with which Annys has been working since the Yule A&S scroll. Again, both artist and writer will happily point out at length the errors and sub-standard bits, but also again, I think most people will argue with us. 
When I can find which manuscript it is which contains the illumination from which I worked, I’ll post it here. For now, I’ll say that the trees are very much in line with the exemplar, enough to make someone who looks at manuscripts all the time say they looked like 14th century trees, and that makes me unreasonably happy.
Hidden: some process-ish shots, in the style of “more”. Read the rest of this entry »
This marks our first official foray into kingdom-assigned scrolls, and I think we did OK. I can tell where all the glaring (to me) errors in the illumination are, and Annys can tell you where all the egregious and obvious (to her) calligraphy mistakes are. I don’t know as anyone else would notice, though. With luck we’ll be asked to do another.
So, on to the specs – in this case, I knew the recipient, and had some channels to double check what I knew of her persona (or, in this case, new persona). Since Emeline has moved from “some sort of piratey English” persona to some form of Viking, I began looking to Viking eddas and other sources for inspiration. I eventually found said inspiration in the doorposts of the Hylestad Stave Church in Norway, famous for the elaborate carvings representing the Lay of Sigurd.
The carvings gave me a great jumping off point, and as I thought about it, it seemed more and more appropriate since Emeline is known to work in wood a fair bit – I have a tourney prize from some years back which made. The particular image I worked from is one of Sigurd and Regin forging Sigurd’s sword Gram. The final piece is a bit of an abstraction, as it’s an ink rendering of a carved wood relief, but I think is does a fine job of evoking the feel of the original. (I elected to forgo drawing the wood grain.)
To go with it, we looked for a later-period hand that might have gone with a Scandinavian stave church, settling on artificial uncial. Our differing pronuncitions of “uncial” inspired the following exchange:
Me: “Artifi-shul un-shul.”
Annys: “Un-see-al.”
Me: “Um… then it should be artifi-see-al un-see-al.”
We wrote the text based on the Thorpe translation of ”The Lay of Sigrdrifa”, from The Edda of Saemund the Learned. The meter is pretty close to the translation, but that’s a bit of a fudge since most translations don’t really do justice to their originals. All the same, we came up with a fun little bit of edda-like verse to explain what award it was, to whom it was given, why it was given out, and by which royals.
Who has Our corslet made?
Stitches fine of golden thread:
Who hast regal draped
This King of East?Emeline Patterson
Has by her hand
attired Us
for Birka day.Thus do We
Gregor three and Kiena
Make her Seamstress to the Crown
In Our Settmour Swamp
At the Thawing of the Mud
A.S. forty six.
Process images after the jump.
The 1990s called, and they want my headline back. Sorry.
You may notice that all of my images are broken right now, right after noticing that the page looks a little different. Well! I’m in the process of migrating blog software, and the image links didn’t come across quite right, so I have to rebuild them. Bear with me, though, I’ll have it all sorted in a bit.
EDIT: It appears all is as it should be, but there may be a few hiccups here and there.
This is the text of Davius Saincte-Jacques’ Silver Rapier scroll, which was calligraphied and illuminated by Mistress Nataliia. I poked around for quite a while before finding a source text which fit the requirements: short enough to stay concise, wordy enough to sound properly Elizabethan, and appropriate to the item being given. The original, linked below, seems divinely inspred and created to match those descriptions exactly.
As by the Grace of Heaven Gregor and Kiena, sovereigns Oriental and Princes of Tir Mara etc. , to the Company, greeting.
Wee will and commande of you, our Company, at the receipt of our missive to deliver or cause to be delivered before us our welbeloved Davius Saincte-Jacques, gent., in consideration of such service as he hath don unto Us by graceful steel in this and divers other Kingdoms, and acclaim him over and above such accolade as he hath already, as a member of your company.
And these our Letters shall be sufficient warrant in his behalf that this Sliver Rapier is given under our Privie Seal, the xxist of January, in Iron Bog at the Investiture there.
Based on a Privy Seal Letter (Warrant) to the Treasurer and Chamberlains of the Exchequer for the payment of a certain sum to the person named therein (27 September, 12 Elzabeth) found on p.96 of “A formula book of English official historical documents, Volume 1” By Hubert Hall
This is the third year Annys and I have contributed a menu for the baronial Yule feast, even though this time Alesone wasn’t cooking it.
This year represents the 40th anniversary of the official founding of the Barony of Bhakail, so we wanted the menu to reflect that. I did several sketches, but it wasn’t until Bruni pointed me towards several images of a critter known as the eastern tiger salamander that I found my real inspiration. The connection between the breed of salamander and the Eastern tyger, the populace badge of the East, was too good to ignore! That’s how this menu came to feature an image of Flambeau (he’s so glossy) the eastern tiger salamander cavorting in flames (the medieval idea of where salamanders were happiest).
The idea of the shield representing the baronial heritage presented itself rather naturally. Using many resources available to me (the internets, the EK wiki, and the memories of several long-time Bhakailis), I sorted out the order of march of the Barons, Baronesses, and vicars throughout the barony’s history, and tracked down the emblazons of each. I expected some issues in completeness here or there, but I think we did a pretty good job of covering all the bases. We even managed to include my signature inclusion, a hidden flamingo, as well as a nod to the probably-aprocryphal tale of the first founding of the barony, a bear named Robert. According to Her Majesty Kiena, I also included a bunny rabbit. His Majesty Gregor isn’t so sure, though.
The menu was offered to Their Majesties as a gift, and they snatched it right up. (Much to the chagrin of Annys, as this was the first one she really wanted to keep – with good reason. It’s really awesome.)
As far as the calligraphy goes, Annys knocked this one straight the heck out of the park. I am totally thankful to have her to make my paintings into real scrolls.
Red pencil, gouache, and Higgins Eternal ink on pergamenata, roughly 10.5″ x 7″
Last year’s A&S Champion, Lissa Underhill, commissioned Annys and me to produce a scroll which would go to her successor at Yule. This one also eluded us for a long time, artisticly, until the details finally fell into place the week before the event. In a funny twist of fate, the person who most wanted to own this scroll ended up winning (for her second time) – Alesone displayed a range of different sugar works and methods, including an example of how bad sugar can go if there’s too much moisture in the air.
We ended up with a scroll text written between the two of us, which happily included an intial “A” which I could illuminate into a salamander enjoying proximity to a candle, the symbol of Arts & Sciences in the Society. The decorative borders are pulled from the Book of Hours for the Use of Paris, an example of which I found here. I haven’t gotten to working with raised gilding, otherwise I would have employed that method here. Annys had, by this time, truly begun to own the gothic hand she was working in, and the text really sells this piece. As pictured, it still has the lines we left for the name of the winner and the signatures of the Baron and Baroness.
Unfortunately for those who love a good piling-on of process shots… I don’t have too many, since this piece came together so quickly. I ‘ll see what I can find and put some up if they’re worth the trouble.
Red pencil, gouache, and Higgins Eternal ink on pergamenata. Roughly 4″ x 6.5″
Initial sketch.
Here are a whole mess o’ process images along the route to completing this scroll, hidden neatly behind the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
While my original plan involved making an elaborate mockup of a book, I set that idea aside when I saw two other -books-as-scrolls, both of which were far nicer and more well-thought-out than what I had in mind. Annys came to the rescue by finding a reference online to the Angers Hours, which was made near where Bruni’s persona lived and at around the same time. We pored over the examples and eventually found a perfect plate – an abbot receiving a heavenly vision of the Trinity. Except… since it was a scroll for Bruni, I realized it needed a slight change – nudity! What we ended up with was a portrait of Bruni, receiving Divine Inspiration for one of her scrolls, which all include a little nudity. Somewhere.
I sketched the piece out in my now-favorite red pencil, and then left it for a while, too afraid of messing up the lovely sketch. Eventually, I did follow through and painted it in gouache, then handed it over to Annys to letter. We presented it at Baronial Yule on December 3rd, to great reaction and a tear on Bruni’s part. Mission: ACCOMPLISHED.
Red pencil, gouache, and Higgins Eternal ink on pergamenata, roughly 8″ x 9.5″
Forgotten - a novella
My friend Nicole has been writing a book of historical fiction for several years. She’s into historical dance, and her research ties dance to the social elements of the time (“Why is this dance done this way? Ohhh… in that era, they wore shoes that might only let you move your feet a certain way”, that sort of thing) and more recently, she’s been focusung on her interest in historical medicine. She’s combined a slew of those pursuits into this book, a novella set during the American Revolution. Long ago she commissioned me to illustrate the cover… and, much like John Radburn’s CD cover, the Muse stayed away on this one for a long, long time. This, despite the fact that Nicole had given me a wonderfully thorough write-up of what the cover should show.
For months, I had nothing.
At all. Bupkes mit bupkes. Thankfully, during this time, Nicole was still finishing the book, so I had some leeway.
When inspiration did hit, and it did, it hit well. The final looks very much like the sketches in layout, although it took me a while to figure out what sort of art style the peice demanded (I’m embarrassed by some of my attempts to fight the direction the drawing wanted to go, see the third rough below). Now it was my turn to research: the cover would show a woman dressed in a man’s cast-off military uniform of the time, so I needed good sources for the uniform. Thankfully, Nicole knew what unit the uniform needed to come from, so I was able to find images to work from for accuracy. Also, I know what a canvas tent looks like. Really. Yet it took weeks of poring over images of rev-war tents to make sure I drew what a tent looked like (or in the case of the final art, the suggestion of what a tent looks like.
The hardest part for me was the actual body positioning. I couldn’t get all the parts to work together, and it took a lot out of me to fight with the drawing that much. It didn’t matter if I worked from photos or life, I. Could. Not. Get. The. Pose. To. Work.
Then, when looking at another friend’s pictures of her new kitten, I saw the very part that was key to the whole pose – the perfect turn of head and shoulder. That was it, the rest fell into place quickly after that. (Incidentally, that friend is happy for Nicole that the book is now published, but more happy that her head is on it.)
And now, the book is now published and a reality! “Forgotten” is available on Amazon, both here and abroad. If you like well-researched historical fiction, complete with no-way-they-couldn’t-have-thought-that-was-good-for-you 18th century field medicine, go buy a copy or two!
Process sketches are after the jump.
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