Award of Arms for Sorcha de Barry

This assignment actually had an excuse to be finished just under the wire, since it began life as a completely different award for a completely different person. We took that in stride, though, and put the other info aside like we’d never heard of it. Hm? What other assignment?

Since the recipient for this was being recognized for lots of work, especially with children’s activities, I sought as a source something featuring either a) children or children’s activities, or b) something which could easilly be altered to show children’s activities. Eventually, I wandered past the teeny tiny book of hours which I’d included in my figure class last year as an example of grisaille, and realized that Jean Pucelle had included scads of street life in his marginalia for that book! Bingo! The corners of nearly all the pages in that book feature lovely little people doing anything and everything one could see in Paris in the mid-fourteenth century – begging, kinging, waterbearing, thieving, what have you – so it was a good candidate for this project. As it turned out, one of the pages of which I found good photos was very nearly useful as it was, so I ended up needing to do little fabrication, just a little cosmetic surgery here and there. Continue reading →