
Back
This was one of my first scrolls, and the first competition entry I had in the kingdom of An Tir. I entered it at my first event, Twelfth Night, 2009. If anyone's curious why and how I managed to enter a scroll in a competition before I'd even been to an SCA event, it's a very long story. Point being, here's the scroll - and I am pleased to say it won a few awards in the competition, something that heartened me to do more scribal work during my time here in An Tir. The Duchess asked for specific supporters, including her cat (Cornelius, she sent me a picture), and a grey dog. I integrated them not only in the heraldric achievement, but also around the Tudor border of the scroll as drolleries, chasing a ball of yarn that ends as the Kingdom Seal. Had I realized at the time that the Herald's Seal would also be used, I would have placed a second (probably red) ball of yarn beside the first, on the left-hand side. Live and learn. The scroll was done on Pergamenta paper (non-animal vellum), gold leaf, gouache pigment. I used a combination of hand-made pigments and standard gouache (the purple was standard gouache, I wasn't very good at mising my red and blue pigment paint at the time), along with egg glair for size in both pigment and as backing for the gilding - which I won't do again, as I didn't like the way the egg glair made the leafing choppy and sticky-looking. Or, that could possibly have been the fact that I used faux gold rather than 24k, but again, this was an early work. The document was done in the general style of a 1580's grant of arms, to celebrate the recipient's Tudor persona. The hand is a standard blackletter-fractur variant, although I flourished it up (some might say 'secretarial') for the purposes of ornamentation. Awards: * Period Materials, * Drolleries, * All that Glitters (use of gold) * Best Calligraphy.

A picture, with the seals on:



An earlier picture, taken before I sent the document to the Scribal College: