Category Archives: Web

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June 2012 Pikestaff cover (April 2012)

pikestaff cover June 2012

I'm so sad - I'm a *March* cover artist! Actually... June works, too.

If you’re a paid SCA member of the East Kingdom, you may have already seen this somewhere. 🙂

This design sprang from my research for my the 14th century figure drawing class I intend to teach at Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium in June. I’ve been looking at examples of illumination and marginalia from the 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries to break down the styles by basic era, and found that the style I use to draw people is pretty close to the style seen in the later 1300s, but that this style doesn’t go as far towards the 13th c. as I thought. However, I have recently found several examples of the style I was first exposed to as “14th century” art, for example, the Vienna Bohun psalter, in addition to the wonderful example of grisielle (gray work) found in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux.

Pages from the Hours of Jeanne D'Evreaux

This is grisieile, or gray-work, and it's a fantastic example of it.

Folio 85v of the Vienna Bohun Psalter

Folio 85v of the Vienna Bohun Psalter, Moses speaking to the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea

For this cover, I finally decided to work from the Vienna Bohun psalter folio 85, which features a scene of the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea within an enormous illuminated capital. More than this, the people in this image look just like the people I usually draw, the kind of figures my hypothesis was built around. A few leaps of creative logic later, I had the pencil sketch for the cover roughed out, using the capital “P” of Pikestaff as my centerpiece. Sketches and the rest of the process follow the jump.

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EK Website – Region maps

Tir Mara map
Northern Region map
Central Region map
Southern Region map

These started life as fairly mundane supplied maps with local SCA land groups marked out, and I was asked to “period-ify” them for the EK site. My first thought was “HOLY HANDBAGS I don’t have time to get materials and draw these things out, marking the baronies and cantons and such!” So I put it aside.

A little later, I realized that because I know the Photoshops, I might be able to work with the borders in the original, but refine them back from “clearly digital in nature” to “looks like ink”. I did a few tests, and combined with a lovely old paper texture I have in my creative arsenal, I found a relatively quick and painless way to go from modern map to ancient cartography. The group names are typeset in a lovely font called Dei Gratia. The images were produced with clear backgrounds so we only needed to code one popup with the background in it, and the four separate maps are includes based on which link is clicked.

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East Kingdom Outfitters art

EK Outfitters Zazzle store banner
We're from the East - We're friendly.

I produced several items for East Kingdom Outfitters, an on-demand swag store benefiting the EK Royal Travel Fund. The idea was to offer imprinted items with Eastern images, things which would instill kingdom pride (much like sports team apparel). I was tasked with creating some original art, and also re-purposing existing art (like group heraldry) for the site as well. Among other things, I created an image called “We’re From the East – We’re Friendly” and the logo for the site.

The logo was done completely digitally, but the “We’re Friendly” art was much more involved. It began as an ink line drawing, which I scanned and cleaned. I set type in Illustrator and painted it in Photoshop over the course of many days (two hours a day of train ride is useful for that).

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2009 Known World Academy of the Rapier/Known World Costuming Symposium website and swag art

KWAR/KWCS swag art

I built and co-maintained the website for KWAR/KWCS 2009, designing it to look as if it had been illuminated and painted. This was a pretty decent challenge, as I’m not a painter, and this was going on the web. The base images are ink drawings, digitally painted in Photoshop. Once we had the site laid out, I designed the image which would eventually grace the event swag (see above.) This was produced on-demand at Zazzle.com.

The real site is long gone, but here’s the sample site. Unfortunately, it looks like the “penguin cam” link is dead too, but I keep holding out hope.

EDIT: Wonder of wonders! The penguin cam is working again! Life is the tiniest bit better today because of it.