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Sovereign's and Consort's Equestrian Champs

This is the first time I’ve been assigned a pair of champions’ scrolls, and on the one hand, I was pleased to find that my estimates for how much work it would be were pretty accurate; on the other hand, I was surprised by how hard the creative freedom was! My usual process includes researching the candidate and tailoring not only the document itself but the text of it to their persona, so having to create a scroll without knowing who would receive it was a new challenge for me. My first impulse was to tailor it to TRM’s personas; however, I also wanted the scrolls to generally match each other (to reduce creative overhead when I knew I was stretching my available time to take these on to begin with), and there isn’t a particular theme for this reign that I could easily follow. The obvious next step was to just say screw it and lean into the specific champion tournament - this is for equestrians, so what horse manuscripts can I find from period to riff off? This turned out to be the...
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Award of Arms for Basil Clarke

Okay, first off, I have to say that this is probably the scroll I am most pleased with to date. I have criticisms of my work, as always, but overall this came out a lot closer to my intent than most of my previous work, and it’s nice to see the gap between taste and talent starting to close a little. I wasn’t planning on doing any scrolls this reign, given how busy I currently am as reign herald for Donovan and Meghanta, but I saw the AoA for this recipient come up on the list of upcoming awards, and given that (a) it wasn’t assigned yet and (b) I absolutely adore this person, I cornered Kingdom Signet at an event and made grabby hands. Given that level of busy, though, and the fact that I work a second job in December, I knew that my timeline on this would be pretty crunched, so I would need to continue using fairly simple exemplars that lean into my strengths, rather than work on expanding outside my comfort zone. So! What do we know about the recipient? Their persona is ea...
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Maunche text for Gavin Kent

This scroll is one where I collaborated with another scribe; I wrote the text, and Konstantia Kaloethina created the physical document. Gavin, the recipient, is a giant nerd about Welsh bardic traditions, and specifically the Mabinogion. I happened to know that he had been hoping that his eventual Maunche scroll would include the little decorative faces on the ascenders of the top line of the text in the Red Book of Hergest, and in talking with Konstantia, they decided that they’d try to make a scroll that matched the dimensions and style of the Red Book as closely as possible. I offered to write text for them, both because that’s a skillset I have more practice in than they do and because I wanted to be involved in this particular scroll. I’m not very accustomed to collaboration on scrolls, so this was a newer experience for me. I did know enough to check with Konstantia about how many words they wanted, and since the Red Book is a calligraphy-primary source, they said “go nuts for te...
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Silver Rapier scroll for Percival Michaelson

  The theme of this piece seems to have been “Choices were made.”  I’m not entirely pleased with some of the choices I made on this one (enough that I was debating entirely redoing the calligraphy before starting the illumination), but I think it came out well enough in the end. Knowing that the recipient’s persona is (primarily) 13th century English made picking an exemplar easy - I had really enjoyed working from the Rugby-de Brailes bible  on a  previous project , which is 13th c. English, and was more than happy to go back to it for another try. Picking a source for the words, on the other hand, was harder than I expected or wanted, this time around. I just was having the devil of a time finding something appropriate for a fighting award, in 13th century England, that wasn’t thoroughly religious. An offhand comment by Effingham led me down a rabbithole of hunting texts, and I landed on the 15th century Master of Game , based off an earlier work. Close enough! Dig...
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Silver Wheel scroll for Emidio di Arquata

I continue to not leave myself enough time to work on scrolls. In the case of this one, I had planned more time, but failed to account for stressing about Kingdom Rapier Champs a week before this was due, and then the BoD threw a wrench into my timeline with their peerage poll - I’m heavily involved in the heraldry community, and spent a chunk of time editing the Pros and Cons document instead of working on this scroll. Ah, well, it still went out on time, but I’d like to be less stressed about it. As usual, I did the entire thing myself because I haven’t figured out how to collaborate with other scribes yet (I’m always worried I’ll ruin their work), and this way my lack of time management isn’t impacting anyone other than myself. The recipient for this one doesn’t have an EK wiki for me to mine for persona details, but based on the documentation for his name as registered (some benefits to being a herald!), I was aiming 14th century Italian, ish. The only other information I had was ...
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