The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

Cursed, I Tell You

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

Cursed, I Tell You
So I teach the class on messing things up and it was a roaring success. Time to fix my own horrendous blunder; it's been put it off long enough.

A disposable scalpel with a curved blade (number 10 blade, available from medical supply houses) was used to carefully scrape away the erroneous truncated blazon, then those spots were filled in with rectangular boxes of designs ("line-enders"). The correct blazon needed to be lettered at the end of the text: Argent, a horse passant sable between three roses azure. I carefully brushed in white paint on the black background: "'Argent, a horse passant between three roses' -- oh, son of a !!!" Left out the word "sable" this time.

After carefully washing off the white painted words "between three roses", I waited for it to dry so I could start over again doing my favorite thing in the universe (NOT!) -- calligraphy. You would think that I could make a NEW mistake... Apparently not, because I then took up the brush and carefully wrote "beteen". Shucks and other comments (mostly X-rated). Wash, wash, wash. Dry, dry, dry. Four words, you moron, can't you write just FOUR more words?!

I was sure I was under a curse. The curse of the Master of Anthony of Burgundy's Black Hours. I wondered what other scribal catastrophes awaited me ere the completion of the Doomed Laurel Scroll From Hell? If Aricia ever received her Laurel scroll from me, she would certainly have a good story to tell about it. No pre-prints or templates for her -- nope, she would have a unique piece of art with its own set of personalized blunders to prove it!

At the class, someone had asked me why I didn't just chuck the entire thing into the garbage and start over. I didn't because a) this was the last piece of black illustration board I had left, b) I had too many hours of my life invested in the piece already, and c) the thought of doing ALL of the calligraphy over again made me want to commit seppuku with a dull pen-nib. Have I mentioned that I hate doing calligraphy? I'm sure I have.

But the blazon was (finally, eventually!) completed, shown in this picture before it was gone over with the silver paint. Later a set of arrows would be placed in the bracketing lines to point to the appropriate place. -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

The West Kingdom History Website was created by and is maintained by Hirsch von Henford (mka Ken Mayer).