The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

The Idea and Layout

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

The Idea and Layout
So many scrolls, so little time -- and so many items sitting on my personal backlog. Sometimes a scroll I asked for will sit for quite some time before an idea sparks for the recipient. The bad thing was, poor Eric's viscounty sat on my backlog for over 10 years and the viscounty was already over 5 years old at that point. The good thing is, I only got better during the interval so Eric is receiving a much better piece than he would have if I were efficient and prompt. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

The advent of black paper on my horizon in the recent past gave me all sorts of ideas; the first one being a Russian lacquer box approach (see Lorenzo di Nebbia Argentea's Pelican scroll). The next idea was to do something involving a night sky. A check of my backlog showed Eric's viscounty waiting patiently for attention and as I pulled up the information I realized his was an Oerthan award (Oertha being the mundane state of Alaska) so what better subject for a night sky than depicting the aurora borealis, aka the Northern Lights?

I settled on a vertical format for the work and divided the composition into four parts -- the heraldic achievement & Arms occupying the upper quarter, the text filling the second quarter, the night sky with aurora would be in the third quarter, and the mountainous landscape would take up the bottom quarter. I thought about placing signatures and seals in the bottom quarter but decided that they could be framed within the mantling of the achievement. For some reason I wanted the top and bottom of the piece to be arched rather than square -- I don't know why it wanted to turn out that way (possibly I'd seen something like that recently, but I don't recall) but I went with the idea. In addition I wanted the trees at the sides and bottom of the piece to show as black silhouettes, carrying the black of the margins up into the piece.

This was sketched out on tracing paper and for quite some time it sat on my drawing board as I was intimidated by the mantling. I finally made myself sit down and just do it -- looked at a lot on mantling in the big edition of The Art of Heraldry by Arthur Fox-Davies, settled on a style which appealed, then drew it in free hand. Normally one can do half the mantling, then fold the piece of paper in half and trace in the other side so the thing is symmetrical; in this case, the circular space for the College of Heralds' seal on the right is smaller than that on the left for the Principality seal, so it had to be adjusted somewhat. Next came the Arms and usually I like to find a good heraldic drawing, reduce it in size, and trace it. But Eric's Arms are arranged in such an odd way with the small compass star stuck up in the top and the two combatant beasts below, that I also had to draw the lion and the griffin free hand as well. That took some finagling to get the critters to fill up the shield but eventually something workable was achieved. The helm and a simple viscountal coronet were sketched in, then the mountains were drawn at the bottom after looking at pictures of the Chagash mountains outside of the Barony of Esakalya (Anchorage). -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

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