My next scroll was a Baronial award for the Kittyhawk for someone in my Canton whom I didn’t know as well as a do now but who was and is still an amazingly lovely and graceful person. She gives her all and does so with kindness. I had to sneak a bit to find out some of her likes (bees, purple, green, etc.) and then looked to exemplars. Bees are not an overly common theme, and where they are is usually as part of a bestiary or they are attacking which is not anything like her. I found my influence in The Hours of Catherine of Cleves.
The calligraphy hand was interesting and I really wanted to stay true to the exemplar. As I stated previously, I’m not as fond of calligraphy as I am painting. I also hadn’t had any guidance up to this point either…it’s rather vague from books and online sources. It wasn’t until I actually had the chance to WATCH someone form letters and hear the nib move and Skitch that it clicked. This was Fraktur (aka Fractur), a Germanic hand. I was still trying to write large letters here, which wasn’t comfortable…hard to explain, but similar to someone trying to write as neatly as possible on a billboard. The strokes felt ungainly and were difficult. Later realization was that I normally write small, and that is where my comfort zone is.
I have not yet had the epiphany that you do the writing FIRST and THEN you devote hours to drawing. This came home to me, painfully so, in this scroll. I was also not adept at “erasing” errors, which as time has progressed, I am becoming better at doing (much to my chagrin).
This is a progression with lessons in shading, detailing and highlighting. I found that I had to extend the bottom left a bit farther than my exemplar, but feel I did well blending it. I also wanted the award to be “not-so-obvious” and rather than plopping it at the bottom, I placed it in the border. I stayed true to the award’s design, just black ink, but retrospect has me wondering about making it blend more with the border. I suspect that I wasn’t so brave at this juncture to change much. I copied the capital from another page, just changing colors to the receipient’s favorites. I filled in the words, smeared a bit and corrected, which, I admit, made me quite low. Here I had spent a ton of time with the border only to make a stupid mistake on the lettering. HUGE lightbulb moment!
Philomene’s Scriptorium 