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sum to the person named therein (27 September, 12 Elzabeth) found on p.96 of “A formula book of English official historical documents, Volume 1” By Hubert Hall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.
Continue reading
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.
Isn't he great?
This distracting fellow was produced for a heraldic submission (if it’s for free, does it still count as a “commission”?). What you see here is the initial drawing, which was simplified a bit for the actual submitted image. I worked from several images of leaping squirrels which I found on flickr, including a wonderful series taken in Scandinavia – hence the tufted ears. I’m extremely pleased with how this one turned out, and I’m going to need to find something to do with it for my own purposes, additional to the original request. It’s too much of a fun image not to.
Ink on paper.
This is a project which has been back-burnered for several summers. It isn’t, strictly speaking, SCA-related, but as I know Jon through the SCA, and it’s current work, it’s going up here.
Jon spoke to me several years ago about doing some graphics work for his web presence and his then-just-an-idea album. We discussed some of the questions I like to have answered when I start a creative project, and then both promptly got busy. We’ve remained in touch on and off about this, but this past winter Jon got several of his ducks in a row and was nearing actually having an album for which he would need a cover and some web marketing, so he asked me to put it back on a front burner.
As I’ve previously noted, Annys and I have produced a menu scroll for each of Alesone’s feasts thus far, and although it came down to the wire, we managed to pull off making one for Mudthaw.
Alesone requested a bee and/or beekeeper theme, since this feast is a celebration of the thawing of the mud and traditonally happens at the end of March. With that in mind, I researched period examples of beekeeper imagery. I wasn’t disappointed: I came across a drawing by Pieter Breugel the Elder called “The Beekepers and the Birdnester“, which, while a derisive allegory aimed at the Catholic Church, features a representation of the totally spooky costume of beekeepers at the end of the 16th century. Mainly, that’s a long, heavy linen tunic with a hood, into which is sewn the bottom of a basket as a mask.
Annys had found a book of hours which she liked, the Waddesdon Manor Book of Hours MS26, fol. 3v (1540), and since this menu was a smaller peice than we’ve done for the previous feasts, she thought the book of hours size would be appropriate. The image pages feature a frame for the text, and a medallion representing the season or a zodiac symbol for the month. I based the frame and medallion this example, replacing the zodiac symbol with a study of a bee. Annys used a hand somewhere between a gothic and a gothic batarde.
After the beekeeper nightmares receded, I went after period representations of bees. This proved disappointing, since most of the examples we found resembled a 2nd grader’s grasp of insect life. I eventually found a sample I could base my rendition on. As disappointing as the images were, our search did yield a translation of a passage speaking about bees, from which we learned:
I find that bit of knowledge priceless, and definitely worth the time we put into the bee research. 🙂
(Process info after the jump.)