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:

• bees are the smallest of birds
• they form from the bodies of dead oxen (first there are worms, then there are bees)
• they live communally
• they select the noblest among them to be King
• they fight wars with other hives
• they make honey

I find that bit of knowledge priceless, and definitely worth the time we put into the bee research. 🙂

(Process info after the jump.)

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Annys and I produced a spiffy menu for last year’s Baronial Yule, and we were asked to do a similar job this year. Since Alesone’s inspiration was “an Andalusian and French feast, as interpreted by an English cook”, we spent some time poring over Andalusian manuscripts for our own inspiration. We eventually found a sample text which lent itself to having three distinct sections within the text, and an intricate illuminated medallion off to the side. Here’s one of the sources, complete with “heavy metal bands in Arabic” section, right in the middle.

In any event, we elected to display the menu in three languages – English, Arabic, and French. I’d like to point out that Annys knocked the Arabic right the heck out of the park. 🙂

For the medallion, I created an Andalusian-flavored fire-breathing salamander dancing in arabasque flames, within a border drawn from the medallion samples we found. The final piece was executed on Arches hot-press, with Higgins Eternal black ink, red and blue Windsor Newton ink, and gouache. Note: Once again, modern reproduction methods fail utterly in capturing the real look and effect of gilded surfaces. 🙂 I’ll put up the process shots in a bit.

For THL Alesone’s first feast, she opted to recreate a multi-course above-the-salt/below-the-salt English manor feast, firmly within the Elizabethan traditon. In addition to doing copious research (that research earned her the baronial Arts and Sciences Championship), she commissioned a traditional menu card for the tables from my wife Annys and me.

When we work together, Annys handles the calligraphy, and I do the “makin’ pictures” part. Between us, we produced this piece – complete with multiple period spellings (or mispellings, as it were), in-jokes, portraits of Their Excellencies Bhakail and the Marquessa of Black Icorndall, and a portrait of the Artist as A Young Party Crasher (Hi!). For some reason, people now expect all of our scrolls to have a flamingo in them.

Closeup of feast scene

My biggest regret on this was that my plan to ink over the painted art failed miserably (at least in my mind). My actual statement was along the lines of “Well, $&*#. It was a fantastic painting, now it’s a ham-handed mess.” Everyone I’ve spoken to about this violently disagrees with me, though.