The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

Practicing the Hand

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

Practicing the Hand
Now it time for the calligraphy, always my least favorite part although after 23 years I'm becoming more resigned. Uncial was the hand of choice for three reasons -- a) using a black letter hand (i.e., gothic) would create a massive white block of text in the composition and might overwhelm it; b) uncial has a "Viking" feel to it which would go well with the subject matter in the composition; and c) Eric Bearsbane is a master calligraphy and black letter is his especial favorite -- no way was I going to present him with a mediocre-to-average black letter, and I didn't want to impose on my good friend and another star calligrapher, Aldith Angharad St. George, to do the work. So uncial it would be!

The text was lettered out three times. The first run was penciled in on a piece of scratch paper to get a rough idea of the size and look of the thing; the text was placed into a box on the paper the same size as that on the actual piece. This let me know that the text would fit and there was no need to work it to make it longer or shorter or perhaps reduce the letter size to get everything packed into the space. It also familiarized me with the shape of the uncial letters.

The second run was painted onto a piece of plain black paper. The purpose was again, to see if the text would fit -- penciled letters obviously take up less space than inked/painted ones, even though one can allow for this by spacing the letters a bit farther apart. Also, it was more practice on shaping the letters. Once it was finished I cut the text out and laid it down on top of the painted sky and decided it didn't look right. The text felt a little cramped; my hand was still in "black letter" mode and the letters needed to be farther apart still; also the text could stand to take up a bit more room.

Therefore it was lettered a third time; the practice run was cut out and laid down on the sky and it now looked just right. Above is a picture of the first draft on white paper, then the second draft on the black paper. -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

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