time for another update!

The latter part of July continued to be just as productive, and though August was mostly filled up by Pennsic I still had time to get a reasonable amount of C&I done. So here's scrolls #29 - #34:

burst of inspiration (and free time!)

June and July were productive months for me. It's been about 15 months since I've started my C&I depth challenge, and I'm now more than half-way there, so I definitely have to think about finding another challenge (or to spend more time on my persona/depth research!).

Anyway, here are scrolls #24 - #28:











The initial on Margarite's was not done by me; this was a scroll blank in Trinite's box, which when I saw I asked to have because I knew immediately what I could do to make something really spiff.

For docs and other info for each of these, see http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/candi/

time for another update!

Haven't done quite so many scrolls in the last few months as I've been finishing up my dissertation, but here is what I've done since my last post. This is numbers #18-#23 -- almost half-way there!


These two were taken from images from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, which I obtained in March and have many pages marked that I want to copy!

This is one that I thought was OK when I finished it, but now every time I see a picture of it again, I find I really like the illumination on it, don't know why.

This was my first attempt at a secretary hand, and the wording is cribbed from some letters of Henry VII, since the recipient is someone whose persona works in service to Henry VII.

The initial here was my first attempt at shading. It turned out better than I thought it might!

And this one I'm half-way happy with, half-way unhappy with. I like the top; it's very reminiscent of my exemplar, and it was such fun to paint with such bright, bold, and contrasting colors. It felt like painting a circus. However, I'm not so happy with the borders and the bottom. Oh well.

The full docs (including exemplars) can be found via http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/candi/

#12-#17

Here's what I've been up to the last few months:

Awards of Arms

Lindquistringes

Further info (include original exemplars, transcriptions of the texts, and translations of the texts), can be found at http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/candi/.

starting with the easy ones

Since my C&I depth challenge has been going so well, I've decided to officially do the persona challenge, using the 20+ page worksheet in the main A&S50 yahoogroups files section. I've always had a relatively concrete idea of what my persona is, so when I looked the worksheet over briefly a few months ago, I was a bit startled how many questions I couldn't answer. Some of them are fairly complicated ones, like what coinage was used during my lifetime, but some of them were fairly straightforward -- I realized I'd never chosen my mother's name, or decided whether or not I had siblings.

So I'm going to start with the easy questions, and work from there.

What is your name? Aryanhwy merch Catmael
What does it mean? "Aryanhwy daughter of Catmael"
What year is it? 1040
When were you born? 1013
Are you considered a child, an adult, or elderly? I'm an adult.
What station or class are you of? Upper gentry.
Is this the same as the station or class you were born to? Yes.
Is it likely to change in the future? I don't think so. It might once I become significantly older and infirm.
Are you wealthy, poor? Adequately wealthy, but not terribly well-off.
Is this likely to change? No, (but see previous).
Who is your father? What is his name? Catmael, a minor Welsh lord.
Where was he born? Caermyrdin (modern Carmarthen).
Is he still living? If not, when did he die? If he died, how did that affect you? He is dead. He died shortly after I was married off.
What was/is his social position? Occupation? He was a minor lord.
Did your father help raise you? Not really.
What did you learn from him as a child? That I was expected to do my duty and marry well.
Is your mother still living? If not, when did she die? If she died, how did that affect you? She died when I was very young; I was primarily raised by nurses.
Did she raise you? Until she died, yes.
What did you learn from her as a child? I was too young to remember much other than the impression that well-bred young ladies did embroidery.
Are your parents married? They were when I was born.
Is their marriage happy? I was too young to know.
What did you learn from their marriage? Nothing.
Did you know your grandparents, and what were they like? I did not know any of my grandparents.
Are you still in contact with any of your family? Only my children.
Are/were you married? To whom? I was married to Briafael.
Are/were you happy in your marriage? I wasn't in love, but I was satisfied with the match that I was in.
What is his occupation? He was a minor lord (a younger son).
How does this affect you? It allowed me to maintain a reasonable social standing after his death.
Is this your first spouse? Yes.
Do you have children? Are they related to your current spouse? I have three children, a son Bran, and a twin son and daughter, Ysfael and Yslani. They were all children of Briafael.
Do they still reside with you? Yes.
How many generations of your family are you really aware of? I have a few stories of my father's parents.
Do you have a lover who is not your spouse? Have you ever had one? No.

That seems like a good start...

I'm going to have to pick another challenge!

When I first signed up for the A&S50 challenge, I was just getting started in calligraphy and illumination. I did the math and if I was to accomplish 50 scrolls by the deadline, I would have to do 8 per year for the next couple of years. That seemed awfully daunting, and I was sure it would be more than enough challenge for me!



That was before I found out just how much fun this was, and started pestering Lady Trinite for backlog assignments, and volunteering for more new assignments, and suddenly it's not even been a year and I've already got way more than 8. This weekend I had two given out in court and also handed over two backlogs. Rather than posting the whole images of them, I'll just post snippets; you can click on the image to get the full picture + discussion/documentation.



And since this makes #8, #9, #10, and #11, I think I'm going to have to find another challenge to do in addition to this one, 'cause I'm going to hit 50 way before the deadline.




-Aryanhwy

#6 and #7

Scroll number 6 in my C&I depth challenge was a Panache scroll for Thomas Flamanc de Kelsale, presented at Kingdom University two weekends ago. When I got the assignment from the signet I was extremely pleased, because it's always so much more fun to do a scroll for someone I know. You can read the full discussion of the text and design here.


Scroll number 7 is a backlog AoA. I wasn't able to find out much information about the recipient, so to come up with design inspiration I created a text and the searched http://www.hmml.org/Vivarium/hmml_collections.htm for all the illuminated "L"s they had, until I found one that I both liked and seemed like something I could manage. I'm quite happy with how this one turned out -- not only am I feeling a lot more comfortable with my whitework, this was my first time seriously trying to mix paints to get different colors. (OK, so this was just blue + white and carmine + white, but the result is much closer to the tones of the original than straight blue and carmine would've been.) You can read the full discussion here.

-Aryanhwy

and it had been going so well

I'd finished all the calligraphy (and there was A LOT), I'd done all the sketching, painted the tree, painted half the arms...and the realized I'd gotten the blazon wrong. *sigh* I'm always extremely worried about fixing errors because I'm afraid that any fix I do is going to need to be fixed itself, so I settled this time for crossing out the wrong word, putting the right one in the margin, and putting a little pointing hand indicating where it's supposed to go. I would've been really happy with this scroll (#5 towards my goal of 50: I'm 1/10 of the way there!) otherwise.

Making good progress

The easiest way for me to keep track of how many scrolls I've done is to be sure to post them all here. :)

This, a Lindquistringes for Maredudd ap Gwilym, is #4 out of my goal of 50, and was completed for Raglan Fair in September.

I'm currently working on #5 and #6 (I hope to finish up at least one of them over the weekend), but both are for Kingdom University, so no pictures for awhile yet! I'm beginning to wonder if I wasn't ambitious enough in my choice of challenge!

-Aryanhwy

3 down, 47 to go

I finished my third scroll for my calligraphy & illumination depth challenge today. All the design elements come from the Visconti Hours, early 15th C Italian. You can read the full details here -- though they're a bit sparse at the moment as I forgot to mark down the folios of some of my exemplars, and so have to go back through the book and find them again.

My next scroll is going to be Welsh in style, and I spent a good part of today browsing digitized manuscripts at the Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wale. Here is a direct link to the manuscripts. I think I'm going to be using the script from the Black Book of Carmarthen and adapting some of the capitals from the De Gray Hours.

-Aryanhwy

Greetings!

Over the course of yesterday evening my student, Ælfwynn Leoflæde dohtor, and I managed to talk each other into participating in this challenge. I'm going for depth: My goal is to complete 50 award scrolls (for new awards and for backlog awards) all based on period exemplars and with full documentation of my choices and materials. (Right now many of my materials are not period, I know, but I hope that as I progress in meeting this challenge I will slowly work towards more and more medieval paints/inks/pens, etc.)

I'm going to count towards the challenge two scrolls that I did earlier this year, one in March, an AoA in 15th C Dutch style, and the other in June, a Laurel scroll based on a 15th C manuscript about the Toison d'Or (the pictures haven't yet been added to this page). I'm currently working on another AoA scroll based on images in the Visconti Hours.

-Aryanhwy