The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

Completed Miniature & Arms

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

Completed Miniature & Arms
Here the miniature has been completed as well as the Arms.

The details of the roses on the Arms have been added with light blue and yellow "seeds" in the middle; the horse (an Arabian, Aricia sent over a sketch of one has been painted black and few small detail lines added in white. The horses have been painted with Lamp Black and a few interior detail lines added with Permanent White. The laurel wreaths and the county coronet in the miniature have been given some detail and touch-up with yellow ochre paint.

Because the blue of the under dress was going to overlap onto the blue of the sky, Ultramarine Blue was used as it's a colder blue than Cobol, in addition to being a more heraldic color. I spent some time on the tracing paper layout to figure out the shading of the folds of drapery on the over dress (a sideless surcoat, aka "Gates of Hell") and also depicting the fall of fabric from the breast. On the sketch there was just a curved horizontal line marking the position of the breast but if the folds at the bottom of the surcoat were going to be depicted realistically, then the top part couldn't be done in a cartoon-like way. A little fooling around with a pencil doing some shading on the original figure eventually yielded the right look. I had originally thought to make the surcoat out of blue or black damask/brocade, but working out the geometry of a pattern would be hard and I just wanted to get on with it, so stuck to plain black. The surcoat was first painted with a very dark charcoal gray (Lamp Black with a bit of Permanent White and just a touch of Prussian Blue to give it some life). The folds were put in with straight Lamp Black using a modified hatching technique (it wasn't quite done in dry-on-dry, nor entirely wet-on-wet either). The same paint was used on the sleeping cat but the shading is much looser with short delicate strokes to give the impression of fur.

The background woven wicker fence and rose bushes were painted in, and then the scene was assessed. There was way too much color happening in the upper part of the composition, so more black was laid down as a rough, loose outlining all over the tree. The figure's face and the stem of the cut rose were showing a tendency to drop into the background, so the entire figure was delicately outlined in black, along with the major features on the face. The capital letter in the text was filled in with a gray-and-white cat (another one of Aricia's cats) and a green background was used (the same color as was used on the peash leaves) with some gold curlicues laid over it. That turned out to be an unfortunate color choice -- the gray on the cat should have been made much darker.

Christian du Glaive obligingly permitted me to re-use his signature from Lorenzo's Pelican scroll (Christian being in Korea at the time) and Susan of Coldwell faxed her signature over. These were transferred to the scroll and painted in white, followed by their titles and some line-enders to fill up the space on each line. -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

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