The assignment was for an Award of Arms (AoA) for Rodrigue Ignis; while I don't know this gentle personally, the information I was given, and what I gathered myself, was more than enough to help me come up with something I had high hopes he would love.
I knew that he was a fighter and that he liked to travel, so the first thought that came to mind was that I wanted something that included armor to personalize it more. I also knew that he had been helping marshal while on the mend, so I didn't want to make it too combat oriented, but to give just a nod towards his preferred martial activity. At this point I remembered a piece I had seen by one of my favored artists, Albrecht Dürer, that I felt was perfect for this award.
The inspiration piece is Saint George on Horseback, see the image below or click HERE to go to the source.
The beauty of this inspiration piece is that it encapsulated everything I was looking for for this particular AoA. A gentle in armor, abroad a horse ready for travel, and a felled foe (in this case, a felled dragon). There were a few things I had to alter to get it to fill the space of the scroll, but the feeling was still captured.
For the scroll, I used 14x17 inch Bristol, a Crow Quill pen and Higgin's Black Magic Ink.
In order to fill such a large space, I moved the dragon from behind the horse to the right side of the paper, in 'front' of the rider, if you will. See below for the layout and the fully completed award:
Coming up with words was....hard. I'm not an experienced wordsmith, so I didn't quite know where to start in regards to period sources for words, so I went and looked at examples of other scribes' words and looked at the flow of Aly's Scribal Mad-Libs as well. With those as examples I was eventually able to come up with the words; which admittedly took me way longer then I'm happy with but I'm happy with the end results.
Words:
Ivan, Tsar and Matilde, Tsaritsa, to all Our beloved Eastern
populace present and future, greetings. The petitions of our subjects have
reached Our ears from near and far, concerning the good, righteous and
honorable deeds of Our very own Rodrigue Ignis. Not the least of which are the
great leagues to which he has traveled to offer his services as marshal when a
wound brought him home from war. As it is Our right and responsibility to
recognize the good works of the citizens of the East, We thusly command that
Rodrigue be awarded Arms in the metal and color of his choosing, and further
command him to consult with Our heralds forthwith. So it be held firmly and
true now and in future times, We have signed the present charter with Our own
hands, done upon this 27th day of January before all in the Barony
of Stonemarche at Market Day at Birka, in the year of Our Society, A.S. LII
The calligraphy was done first, as it's WAY easier, and less heart attach inducing, to start over if you mess up the calligraphy before you start the illumination. Once that was done I covered it with another piece of bristol and some painters tape to make sure nothing happened and then I moved onto the illumination itself.
I took pictures throughout the process, which ended up being something like 60+ pictures (which is probably far too many to try and list in a single blog post) so I pared it down to about half and then I put them all into the below rotating image.
In the rotating image, you can see the shading process as I go; I basically started from left to right in an attempt to minimize any possibility of dragging through the ink, though I have a tendency to jump around a little bit. Thankfully Higgin's ink dries wonderfully fast.
While I wasn't able to watch the award go out in person, I was able to watch it thanks to a live stream and I was really happy to see that Rodrigue seemed pleased with the piece.
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