Almost 2 years ago now a friend had been awarded her Award of Arms at an event.
Sadly there was an issue with it and before she could take it home it disappeared. Unfortunately, she has had a lonely blank spot on her wall since then. Prior to the pandemic, I said I would replace the missing AoA for her and took on the backscroll.
It took a bit for me to get around not having a firm deadline when the pandemic hit but as things looked better I finally sat down and armed with the knowledge I had picked up from classes I had been taking got to work.
Since this wasn’t a surprise I opted to have her input on what she would like to see on a scroll and after many examples, I settled on one with a ship.
The first thing I did was lay out the scroll text and all digitally. I was rather proud as normally I eyeballed how much text space is needed and let my favorite calligrapher sort it. (Not recommended unless you and your calligrapher work on the same wild method of last-minute winging it with a touch of magic.)
This time however the Aspiring scribes group on Facebook had convinced me, I could trace calligraphy and make it look like the real deal. (There is even a handout with fonts that match hands.)
I own a set of nibs and a trip to the local art store got me some new black and green ink. The exmplar used colored inks and I was interested in highlighting both her name and the crown for dramatic effect. I did a few little trading cards to see how the ink reacted and just maybe if I had any improvement in my own hand. (Spoiler I am okay but not the whole scroll worthy.)
We had a convenient scribe afternoon come up and I took the opportunity to work on the AOA. Before I started I had my mock-up proofed ish (Folks “ish” is the keyword.) But we all were giddy with hanging out again so I got it lined up and all set to start without really looking at it.
Settled in with my lightboard the mockup taped to the back the bristol I set to work once satisfied it was lined up.
Not going to lie I had a piece of cat fur that just about derailed the project less than a line in. I was able to pull it off and carry on. In fact, I got everything traced and was working on lifting the illumination happy as the end was in sight!
I thankfully sent a progress photo to the recipient and she says looks lovely save for a spelling mistake. A simple “S” for “E” and to be fair they look similar in this hand. So I headed it over to a fellow scribe who also heralds to see what my chances of lifting the mistake would be.
Yeah, remember ish? We had the following conversation.
Hey you know you are missing like the last 3-4 lines of text?
…….No.
Yeah. It happens the handbook is hard to make sure you lift all the text off of. (Good news this was fixed just days later!)
Arg.
There was no salvaging it at that point.
So it was back to the mockup that I quickly discovered I had only saved it as a PDF.
Trust me starting from scratch wasn’t what I had planned but here I was and hoped it would come together better than last time.
