The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

Lines for the border painted in white and the start of the filigree pattern made. All the lines were eventually painted gold in the border.

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

NOW He Tells Me

"Now as I prepared to paint the border on Lorenzo's scroll, I thought about those lions. Would it be possible to work lions into the border? I suppose I could -- do some scrollwork lions instead of a series of repetitive shapes. Maybe a lion's head to either side of the Pelican badge? I doodled on paper at work during meetings, looked at a lacquer box I have from Palekh, which had a wide filigree border running around its sides. On two sides of the box the wide strip of border humped up into a half circle -- I think I'd had the box for several years before I noticed one day that the half circle in the border on one side was a winged lion done all in fine lines of gold filigree. I did some sketching on the tracing paper layout and decided that I could tackle this, and drew one lion in a couching sneak (sort of a cross between passant and couchant) and a second one in a modified rampant pose standing on top of the corner square which was going to hold my sigil. Once I was satisfied with those, I used the white pencil scribble technique to transfer the two lions onto the black illustration board. Then I flipped the paper over and used the lions in reverse, until I had them distributed around the border.

"The straight lines and circles of the border were painted first with white. I started over painting that with gold gouache just to see how it would look with gold versus silver as I'd thought about over painting with aluminum to sort of pick up the silver letting of the text. The consensus was that gold worked best.

"I could not seem to paint an even line that day -- at least, my lines here looked blobby and sloppy to me. I decided that this would probably look better once the filigree was added in, so I started work on the rest of the border. I painted in the crouching lions, then started "disguising" them with more curlicues and curving lines, trying to make the whole affair more or less fit evenly inside the lightly penciled margins marked for the width of the border. The uneven appearance of the painted filigree work is due to the white paint picking up the black dye and starting to go gray. Eventually I fell into a rhythm of doing about four strokes of filigree, then rinsing the brush and picking up a fresh load of white paint. -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

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