The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

Bling-Bling

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

Bling-Bling
All of the stems were gone over in gold. I made a tactical blunder here -- to indicate thicker stems, I used doubled liens on the layout. As I frantically painted over the lines, instead of making thick lines, I just painted the outline as it drawn. So the effect of the border isn't as delicate as it should have been. This became obvious once the gold stems, silver leaves, and various colored flowers were finished and I stepped back to judge the overall appearance of the piece. When I compared with the color xeroxes of Black Hours pages, it was just clunky.

To address this, I started putting little gold curlicues off the heavy stem outlines, running little tendrils here and there, and filling in the odd spot with gold "spiders" (round spots with radiating lines). That reduced the stark look of the border and helped bring it back towards the ordinal Black Hours inspiration.

I put in time of the scroll every day; although it wasn't ready for Twelfth Night, I brought it along and painted on the border at the Scribes' table there. I don't know if it inspired anybody to sign up as a scribe, but it was a nice 4-hour work session. It took another twelve hours' worth of work to finish off from that point. My T-H-T sigil was tucked into the border (on the upper left-hand side, it's hard to make out) and the inscription was made on the back which tells the recipient what the inspiration was, the materials used, and how long it took (I honestly lost track on this one but it took much longer than anything I'd ever done before, probably well over 150 hours). -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

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