Project: 16th c Altar Card - Part 2

Post number 2 about my A&S champ entry is documenting all the progress pictures and my creative process.

First thing's first.  In trying to recreate this piece, I had to get down to business with my least favorite part of the scribal process: arithmetic.  For scaling this piece, there was a balance of what would work for the amount of words I had and how large of a piece of parchment I would need.  With the assistance of Thyra, we settled on 1.2x scale of the original and have a boat load of notes on how we scaled it.  You can see a mix of my handwriting and Thyra's on this.  We both apparently have tiny handwriting.

I wanted to remain close to the original layout.  In editing down the coronation text, the ceremony for the sovereign and consort line up pretty well leaving the center text space for a "benediction" or in this case the end of the coronation ceremony.

The coolest (in my opinion) and most unique part of the layout is that the margins go all the way to the edge of the paper.  There is a 1/4" inch margin on the sides that needed to be cut after calligraphy was completed.

A quick interlude to show off the giant mess that is my workstation.  I had a stack of size 6 Mitchel nibs that I went through.  Also let's take a moment to talk about that bottle of gold ink.  That is a (sadly) discontinued bottle of Dr. Martin's Spectralite 18K gold I used as a substitute for shell gold.  It flows like a DREAM.  

Once all the calligraphy was done and the center tyger was sketched to my liking...it was time for paint! But first the tyger had a bit of a makeover going on.  He got SUPER FLOOFY, then less floofy, then pretty swole, then less so... well...you can see what the changes were on the next few pictures.

Before moving on to the rest of the colors, I did some text swatches on my piece of practice parchment.  There were a few iterations of the red color as I was trying to find a balance between earthy red and well...brown.

Above: take a look at the ink splotch hanging out on the right side.  Below: what ink splotch?  Turns out scraping/fixing mistakes on parchment is super easy.

Guidelines were erased and the last bit of trimming to the finished size...and.........poof!  The entire piece is DONE.

Below is my display for A&S Champs.  I'm pretty happy with it. :)

Coronet - Nadia

So right after I finished Simona's barony scroll, I agreed to do a fairly last minute coronet for Nadia whom I adore.  I was kindly asked to do a Hufflepuff themed coronet.  So onward this Slytherin went to make a coronet...

I started using a 1.5 inch veg tann leather strap I had in my stash and used my CB coronet template to space the points.  I like the center of the coronet being the "dip" between points so it's not as noticeable when it's off center while wearing it.  I was told to make a 24.5 inch coronet and allowed the extra spacing to be on the two "ends" of the coronet because that number just seemed off. Inside edges of the leather was beveled to smooth out the lines and create a more finished look.

The main body was dyed USMC black and the bottom accent line was tapped off.  There was some dye bleed through so I used two layers of white gesso to create a smooth surface for the yellow that would eventually go there.  The yellow was a liquitex acrylic.

Holes for the head pins were dremelled into the points of the leather.  The 1 in head pins were inserted through the agate stone beads and adhered into the holes using my good friend E6000 adhesive.  Those beads would not be going anywhere.

Marieta created a badger outline stencil for me using a pic I found online.  Those were outlined in white liquitex and the black on the bodies of the badgers was gone over again in paint.  I ended up going over the entire black part of the coronet in a light coat of black liquitex to reduce streaking and some leather imperfections that were showing through the dye.

Two holes were punched in the back so it could be tied closed.  I sent this on it's merry with Her Majesty for a matte spray finish before it was handed off to Nadia.

Mother flerkin badger are hard to paint.

I love his chubby badger butt.

Award Medallion - Silver Rapier for Eva

I found out less than a week before the event, my Laurel Eva was going to be getting Silver Rapier.  Cue Tuesday morning scribal chat with our plans for the evening....Thyra is going to be working on the scroll for this.  I casually question if there is a medallion lined up.  Long story short (and a quick EK wiki check that there is no Sharc legacy medallion), I have come up with a plan.

I'm still limited on scribal work due to carpal tunnel, but my hands have been much better this week.

The PLAN (tm):
- paint a Silver Rapier on perg
- use spare cabochons to make a medallion
- do some finger loop braiding to make a cord.

Tuesday scribal night had me finish up the painting and co-opting Thyra's cabochans (since my house ate my supply of cabochons) and her working hands for some work with a pair of pliers.  Wednesday and Thursday was finger loop braiding with the aid of my ever patient husband Sergei as we shooed the cats away from the string and watched TV.  He held the cord (and retied silk strings when they untied on me) while I braided

The cord is a blue and white spiral pattern using silk thread (size 10/2).

Medallion is gouache on pergamenata with commercially bought cabochon parts.

Medallion

Finished medallion with cord. Probably the most even braiding I've gotten in a long while.

Vigil Planning for Matthias - Part 4

On this post, I'll be focusing on the vigil book.  This was a tag team effort with the ever talented Anastasia our embroidery ninja, Thyra who did the calligraphy on the book, and myself.

If you haven't checked out Anastasia's blog entry on the book, it can be found here.

It was requested by Duke Edward (Matthias's knight) that the knightly lineage of his line be included in the vigil book.  Whomever did Edward's book, did a lovely job of illuminating and calligraphing the names and arms of the lineage (who were all Eastern Kings as well) and created a daunting piece of work to live up to.

With that looming, I began to sketch and layout the design...

First thing on this was Gryffith had a second reign.  That was one of the first things that would need to be updated in the new lineage layout. Secondly, Edward's arms would be added and the greyhound would need to be drawn with a ducal crown as a collar.

I do like that all of the animals are wearing their coronets (Gryff's coronet is like a super hat over both stags) and it was suggested that the unicorn on Matthias's arms could be drawn with a baronial coronet to match.  I decided against this from an aesthetic point of view , as well as I hadn't seen this done on other devices or if it was done it's not wide spread and I wanted to put the focus on the knightly chain and mantling of arms.  This was actually the first page I did, but the second in terms of location in the book. 

The first page was going to be more detailed since I was modeling it after Edward.  In his book, his arms were presented with a helm and mantling all encircled by a god knightly chain.  Take a cue from this, I set Matthias's up in a similar fashion.  I sketched out the general look (minus the device) and decided to change the helm from a front facing helm to a side facing one.  I would like to fool myself into thinking this was purely aesthetics, but I have a hard time with symmetry for audience facing pieces and will endlessly fiddle with it to look right (and I already was fiddling enough with the acanthus leaves).  I didn't have that kind of time and I really do like the profile styled helm.  I also decided to do the knightly chain as a necklace instead of encircling the entire device.  Side note, I had to repaint the chain.  I started doing it in silver because it looked better and then confirmed it needed to be gold.  Ah well. The progress pic below doesn't really show the screw up.

Looking pretty evil as is fitting for "the Evil Squire".

The rest was all unicorns and rainbows...I mean...comets.  Funny thing about comets.  Heraldic comets kinda look like a star-topped Christmas tree that fell over.  See below:

The Christmas tree is toppling over! And now you can't unsee it either.

There were many jokes and stories about cats climbing decorated trees that escalated into fits of giggles while I was working on this.  That led me to try to find something, anything, that wouldn't invoke giggle fits when I looked at the book.  I ended up finding a period or at least traceable art worthy selection that wasn't going to scream "Christmas is ruined!!!"

With the comet and unicorn drawn, they just needed paint. The acanthus leaves and helm got some paint as well.

Black outlining was added to make the chain pop and you can't even tell I started painting with the wrong metallic.  Highlighting was added to the acanthus leaves and a little bit to the helm. 

The final picture of the ancestry (with Thyra's calligraphy) is below.

Vigil Planning for Matthias - Part 2

Now that we had decided on the vigil garb, it was time to look for inspiration for the detail pieces - particularly the embroidery portion of the outfit.

Thyra and I sat down and looked for inspiration.  Off the bat, we decided that a group of people learning how to do German Brickwork stitch was not going to happen (because we like our friends and want to stay friends with them).

We stumbled upon this lady's blog in searching for inspiration: http://medievalartcraft.blogspot.com/2012_03_01_archive.html  There are lovely examples of her inspiration of polychrome tiles from a church in Burgendy.  More google searching led to information of this being a thing in various portions of Europe.


In Slovinia - http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Slovakia/West/Bratislavsky/Bratislava/photo1450819.htm

In France - http://www.france-voyage.com/travel-photos/photos-brou-royal-monastery-2112.htm.  We also liked this from Kathy's blog - http://medievalartcraft.blogspot.com/2010/03/brick-stitch-pattern-20.html

In Germany (out of period restoration) - http://jsah.ucpress.edu/content/7/4/466. You need a subscription for the article, but a google search of the church will yield some nice pictures.

In Vienna - http://www.stephanskirche.at/. St Stephan's Cathedral roof is wonderful.

St Stephan's Cathedral.  Vienna, Austria

We did some initial sketching before deciding on a modified version of Kathy Storm's blog and embroidery pattern especially since we found examples of tiny M's in some of the brick work roofs.

Feilinn and Thyra get sketchy and toy with different ideas for trim!  You can see we started off with a comet theme since no one wanted to embroider unicorns.

With the planning done, it was off to the Worshipful Company for figuring out how to do this and get it sewn.  Marieta worked with Thyra to do the layout of the design with a pattern website I found (https://www.stitchfiddle.com/en),  There was much hand waving and magic (and swearing and throwing things I imagine) and *poof* we had silk, a pattern traced out, thread from Akaterine, and it was off to the races with our embroidery kits.  14 kits in all done by 13 people. It was decided to do a backstitch for the embroidery since there were so many pieces.  Three strings of silk floss were used.

Here is my work for one of the sleeves of the purple silk over tunic.

One done.  You can see the pattern traced out on the plastic medium as a guide.

Two of four done for the sleeve.

All four done.  My husband's truck keys inadvertently provided for scale.

Sketch time - Tyger courant

A call went out on FB and G+ in November 2015 for a line drawing for a "tyger courant" which would be used for the badge for the Golden Lance, a new (in the East) Order of High Merit for equestrians.

I said I'd take a stab at it and spent a bit of time fiddling.  I did a general trace of the East Kingdom populace badge and then freehand/tweaked the entire thing to make it less "meh"... oh and of course move the legs into a courant or running/leaping pose.

Heraldic tygers are weird creatures.  Between the beak, puffy fur, and weird toes, I fought with myself for a bit on what looked "right" for it.  The finished product was outlines in a back micron pen and emailed away.