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 correct tack to take, though it did still take me a long time to find something I liked to work from.
So, the tl;dr of these scrolls: the document is based off Harley MS 4751, which is a 13th-century English bestiary; the text is based off The Master of Game, which is a 15th-century hunting treatise that expands on the late 14th-century Livre de chasse. The primary reason I chose a different and earlier exemplar for the document, rather than just using one of the extant manuscripts of the Livre de chasse to work from, is that I am still primarily a calligrapher, and my ability to do representational art that looks like the things it’s supposed to represent is still pretty minimal. There are some manuscripts where the people look like people and the horses look like horses; I’m not confident that I can manage to adequately imitate those, but I think that a derpy-looking stylized horse from a 13th-century bestiary is probably within my stretch capabilities. And so it turned out to be!
I made some adjustments to my usual process for this scroll, beyond the challenges that accompany a champs scroll. Normally I do my text entirely separate from considerations of the manuscript I’m basing the document on, as though I’m a separate wordsmith working in isolation; this has not generally been a good process, and I’ve been meaning to change it for awhile, so this was a good opportunity for that. This time, I started by looking at my exemplar and noting things about its proportions: the image takes up just about half the page, leaving a single text block of 14 lines, and each line comprises roughly 7 words in Latin, on average. I didn’t do a deep dive into the relative word lengths between Latin and English to account for the difference for my word count (though I might at some point, just to have that conversion easily to hand for future), but figured starting with a ballpark of 98 words, plus or minus, would be a reasonable starting point, rather than just autopiloting my way to 175 words by default.
This provided both a new challenge - how to say what I need and want to say in just over half the words I normally would default to - and a slight reprieve, given that I still wasn’t quite sure how to write text for a champion scroll rather than one for a known individual, and having fewer words in which to do that seemed easier.
The process of finding a source text to base my words off was harder than I expected - I spent longer than I wanted going down several rabbitholes, all of which were ultimately dead ends, before finally settling on the Master of Game, which I’ve used in the past and quite liked. It unfortunately doesn’t have a section on hunting with horses, or much of anything about horses specifically, but it does have this:
Secondly men are better when riding, more just and more understanding, and more alert and more at ease and more undertaking, and better knowing of all countries and all passages; in short and long all good customs and manners cometh thereof, and the health of man and of his soul. For he that fleeth the seven deadly sins as we believe, he shall be saved, therefore a good hunter shall be saved, and in this world have joy enough and of gladness and of solace…which is just about perfect, since after all, these scrolls aren’t for the horses themselves, but the people who ride them. So I did a first pass adapting that, was delighted that my first pass came out to 99 words, realized I hadn’t put TRM’s names anywhere in the text and I wanted to start it with an E anyway (to match the exemplar), and revised until I had the following:
East, hear the decree of [King Culann/Queen Honig III]! It is said that all good folk are better when riding, more just and more understanding, and more alert and more at ease and more undertaking, and better knowing of all passages and all challenges; in short and long, all good customs and manners cometh thereof. [name] has proven this to be true and correct, riding with great joy and great skill, and shall therefore be named [Sovereign’s/Consort’s] Champion of Horse, and shall have joy enough and of gladness and of solace. Done by Our hand at the River War in the Barony of Iron Bog, AS 61.Next steps were to sketch out the layout (which would also give me an idea of how hard drawing the horses would be) and see how much space I have for everything; this is also the point at which I realized I had several process changes I wanted to make from my usual, and spent a little while spinning my wheels while I figured out the optimal order of operations. Normally I compose the text first, followed by a brief layout and hand-practice phase; then calligraphy, then finally the art. In this case, I have my final text, but I actually think I want to do the art before the calligraphy, because with the words all in one block below the art (rather than in two columns, or with a mid-text capital that needs to be placed after the words are written), it doesn’t actually matter which one is done first, and I’m more confident in my ability to not fuck up the calligraphy than the art - so if I do the art first and make an irreparable mistake, I have fewer hours sunk into it and can restart more easily.
The other major process change I wanted to make was my physical setup. In the past, I’ve used a travel easel box that has a fairly wide ledge and not much ability to adjust height; I’ve jury-rigged it with books behind my page, and blocks under it to raise it up, so that I can maybe have not-terrible ergonomics. It usually ends up meaning that text at the bottom of the page, and at the right-hand margin, gets sloppy because my wrist isn’t as supported as it should be, and it generally feels a little jankier than I’d like. I’ve been meaning to just get a regular tabletop easel and a board to tape my page to, so with a new project to start, I finally got around to doing that, and it turns out that’s great and I should have done it ages ago!
During the layout phase, I could tell that it would be possible but probably pretty frustrating to try to freehand copy the horses from my exemplar, and said screw it, tracing is period. I managed to print out the art of the horses pretty much exactly the size I needed, and used my lightbox to trace the first one. I had preemptively sized out the background boxes to the proportions I’d measured them at in one spot, but when tracing, it became clear that they weren’t as even as I thought they were; I didn’t bother to adjust them to match the exemplar more closely, and just traced the horses themselves. I realized that I had two scrolls to do and I could either make them identical, or do one as the mirror image of the other; this is obviously the path I took. I didn’t do any of the things that would have made tracing the mirror-image one easier, like tracing it onto the back of the printout first, or flipping the image and reprinting it - I just turned the page over and did my best. I wasn’t as happy with it as I wanted to be, but after taking a little while to adjust the pieces I wasn’t super pleased with by comparing against the exemplar, I actually think some of those parts came out better than the one that I more accurately traced, go figure.
I realized that for doing two scrolls, I could either do one scroll completely and then the second scroll completely, or I could batch the work - do each small section of work on both scrolls before moving on to the next bit. I ultimately decided that it would create greater consistency between them to batch the work, and I really liked how that went and would do it for anything similar in the future.
In terms of the actual art itself, this was pretty straightforward. I copied what I saw in the exemplar, as best I could; this was a little rough when it came to figuring out how to get the shading to look right, but gouache is really easy to blend, and I think it came out all right. I was slightly terrified that in doing the black outlining of everything that’s really required for this style of art to look correct, I would ruin everything I’d so painstakingly worked on, but it turns out no, I was pretty steady-handed (except in outlining the straight lines on the text boxes, and even that isn’t too much worse than the exemplar), so hooray. I appreciate that, probably partially because of how I batched them, neither scroll came out obviously better or obviously worse than the other in any distinctive way. On one of them, the rear-most horse is pretty perfect, as is the blue horse’s tail and shading, as well as the hooves overall, but the red half-horse adjacent to the blue one is pretty janky, the blue border in the background is unevenly filled, and I had some struggles trying to get the 5/0 round brush I used on the mane and tail details to work right, so those are blobby in places. On the other one, it’s pretty much the opposite - the rear-most horse is wobbly, the blue horse’s tail has too many sections, and the overall shading is a little less blended than I’d like, but the red half-horse looks correct, the borders are solid, the mane/tail details look correct, and the shading in the sitting horse’s butt looks right.
On to the calligraphy, then! I knew I’d need practice with this hand because textualis semi-quadrata is always one I struggle with consistency on, and this was no exception. In terms of spacing, this looked like 1:1 line spacing or maybe just a hair tighter than that; letter spacing is pretty close, but there’s enough space between words for legibility. Half-r as usual, long s basically everywhere, including at the ends of words, though I did see one “alias” ending in a short s and didn’t care to try. I chose not to use abbreviations both because this is English not Latin, and because I needed to take up as much space as possible. This looked like an x-height of approximately 4 nib-widths, and the math for the amount of space I had available said that I should use a 1mm nib for that, and an Ames setting of 5 (once again my thanks to Alexandre Saint Pierre for his conversion table of Ames setting measurements!), so that’s what I did.
This is another place where I was grateful to have changed my physical setup - having my page taped to a board on an easel meant I could just take the board to a flat surface (my gremlin nature meant this was the floor, but it could also have just been a clear table) to draw my guidelines, with gravity holding my t-square in place, rather than needing to fight with everything the whole time. It’s great.
I did enough practice to be reasonably confident in my execution of this hand, though the one thing that I struggled with for the entire first scroll of the two was the darn serifs on the ascenders - I can manage those when they’re angled, but these are flat, and I could not for the life of me figure out a stroke order that got them to look right. I did finally figure it out on the second scroll, and I’m very pleased with how the calligraphy looks on that second one as a result. I was also quite pleased that for once in my life, I didn’t hate the letter /a/ - this is notoriously my least favorite letter, because it generally shares few characteristics with other letters, so you can’t just cross-train with your /o/ and your /i/ and your /l/ the way you can with so many other letters, but I’m getting better at seeing the proportions of the /a/ in a way I never used to be able to, and then also copying those reasonably successfully.
A thing I was very curious about, when doing two scrolls with roughly identical text, was whether I’d be consistent enough in my calligraphy to have the text hit the same places on the page between the two scrolls - and it turns out, mostly yes! Apart from some places at the start of the first one where I was adjusting and figuring out my rhythm, and the slight differences in length between Culann and Honig’s names (and Sovereign vs Consort), by the sixth line the text was hitting the same places, which was very convenient for making sure the blank space I left for the recipients’ names was the same across both scrolls.
The last piece, after everything else was done, was to draw the starting capital and do the ink flourishes off of it. Once again, this is a place where both scrolls had strengths and weaknesses - one of them has a better capital and worse ink flourishes, while the other is the opposite. I don’t have much to say on the ink flourishes, other than that I tried to just copy what I saw and adjust for the places where flipping the art meant I couldn’t just copy exactly. It went generally more smoothly than I anticipated, and I’d enjoy doing more of this in future scrolls.
Overall, I’m reasonably pleased with these two scrolls; I could wish there was slightly more consistency between them (and often, the one I did second was slightly worse, which I find interesting - maybe I just lost focus or got sloppy because I’d already done it once?), and I could wish that I’d had a little more time to do things like put diapering in the background boxes to reference each of TRM’s heraldry, or fix the one tiny spot between two of the horses’ legs that didn’t get painted on either scroll, but for stretching outside my art comfort zone of “geometric designs, flowers, and weird little dragons,” I think these came out overall really well and I’m pleased with them.
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