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.
This is grisieile, or gray-work, and it's a fantastic example of it.
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.
Initial pencils. The lighter red marks are the rubric of the layout canon I used.
Now that I had an image of the personified East accepting a flag of truce from a delegation from the Middle, I felt it needed some groteques or other marginalia, which led me to Jean Pucelle’s work on the d’Evreux Hours.
All inked up, with the title "calligraphy" in place.
My image features an artist, clutching a flamingo and a paintbrush, running away from a woman with rabbit legs, as well as a goblin, a tyger face, and a horse-legged matron spinning the hair from a harpy onto a drop spindle. I did the calligraphy (such as it is) myself, as my lovely wife was in Zimbabwe while I finished the piece. While it works here, I am in no way deceiving myself that it’s any good.
As this was cover image, the final was scanned into Photoshop for cleanup and publication prep. I also ended up elongating the layout to better fit the required dimensions.
Black ink on paper. Approximately 7.5″ x 10″.