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”.

My first sketch, with practice inking, and the final inks. I realized only after I’d done the practice inking that I hadn’t grabbed a photo of the pencils.

Closeup of the fighters. This image and the next show how much I changed my mind about the scale in the final – you can see the original ground plane just above the fighters’ knees.

The left-hand tree and tent, and original ground line

Closeup of the shield and right-hand tree and patient raven

Black, red, and green Windsor & Newton ink on Arches hot press. Approximately 8.5″ x 5.25″.