The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

First try at the calligraphy -- working out the Russian style hand. Upper section doesn't have proper proportions.

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

Calligraphy - First Draft

"This is the first draft of the calligraphy. The Slavic flavored hand was based on the Kiev Psalter with some slight modifications to allow for English letters. The calligraphy was to be painted onto the black background with silver paint, so the initial run of the text was to acquire familiarity with the hand, accustom myself to using a paintbrush instead of pen for the work, and check to see if the text would fit in the box. This was done using blue paint on a piece of white scratch paper. As it was, I lettered the first six lines and then decided that the overall look of the hand wasn't right -- backing off and looking at it, I realized that the letters were too squat. The Slavic hand was more elongate and rectangular. I changed the spacing of the letters and the subsequent text was very much more the thing.

"In the background from the bottom and going clockwise are a printout of the award text, a picture of a lacquer box which had a border that included roundels (rejected in favor of a different design for the layout of the border), a package of powdered verdigris which was used later on, a print out of a beautiful scroll done by Geneviéve d'Evreux which was in Russian with English written underneath the Russian text, a little plastic box which holds my pen nibs and beneath that is a copy of a page of period Russian manuscript." -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

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