Stik's Art - Calligraphy and Illumination

[Stik]

I thought I had posted my artwork on PADnD, but I don't see it here anymore. Maybe it was lost in the reboot.

Nope, reboot didn't effect the forums. Thus why they are independent logins

but they could be buried deep ..

[Stik]

The next two were Augmentations of Arms for a husband and wife, Pedro and Esther de Villarquemada.




The two scrolls can stand alone, but are intended to be displayed side by side. If you look from one to the other, you will see that the two borders are mirror images of each other, but with all the colors reversed.


This next one's too big to fit here. Click the thumbnail.

[Stik]

Click thumbnails for full size

Augmentation of Arms for Johanna von Danzig



Nameless Order for Elena di Salaparuta
(And in case you are wondering, she is making a glass bead in the portrait.)

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[Stik]

These were a matched pair, for a husband and wife.

Ten points to the first one to identify what elements connect the two scrolls. Twenty bonus points to the one who gets the whole "in joke" involved in the artwork.

Augmentation of Arms - Tomas Hanover von Eisenfaust




Augmentation of Arms - Bronwyn Swan Neck

[Stik]

This is for the Nameless Order, an award given to people for service to the organization:




This one's an Augmentation of Arms, which is another service award given to someone who has the Nameless Order:

[Stik]

The Order of the Quill is an award given to exceptional calligraphers/illuminators in the Kingdom of Acre.

Click the link below for the full-sized image:




In addition to being a calligrapher/illuminator, Ariana is an archer, an avid reader, and the owner of an African grey parrot, so I incorporated all of these into the illumination. She is also a big fan of the color purple so much so that her car has a bumper sticker which reads: "Everything PURPLE is MINE" so I used that color as much as possible.

[Stik]

The rank of Sergeant is given to fighters in the Kingdom of Acre who are exceptional but who are not yet qualified to be made knights. Being made sergeant is typically an indication that the fighter is on his way to becoming a knight.

Click the link below for the full-sized image:

[Cole]

These are really cool bud. How do you make the parchment and design around the edges for your writings?

[Stik]

How do you make the parchment and design around the edges for your writings?

Every bit of color on the page is done by my hand.
I start with a blank piece of "Bristol Board" paper a few inches bigger than the finished piece.
Layout for the border, artwork and guidelines for the writing are done in light pencil with drafting tools.
The lettering is done with a special fountain pen.
The border and interior artwork are hand painted with fine brushes and outlined in ink with a very very fine pen.
Once it's all done, the pencil lines are erased and the page is trimmed to size.

[Cole]

Yeah it looked hand done Something about things done by hand that just look better. I'm debating doing Arkuth's world map by hand someday, like I did Vastonia. Hand is the way to go for the most part... more authentic Well done btw!

[Stik]

I've thought for a long time about doing some hand-drawn maps. The down side is that doing an award scroll like the ones on this page takes many hours (I'm getting faster, but the one above probably has about 12-14 hours in it), and a map would take considerably longer, yet it would be of limited utility.

[Cole]

Yer, my map of Vastonia was 48 full hand drawn 11x8.5 pages and it took me about 6 months and there was no color... all black and white done on textured / tea-bagged paper

[Stik]

More calligraphy.

I did both of these scrolls in response to a challenge from a friend of mine. She told me back in August that all of the work I do is in the early gothic hand, with matching illumination, and challenged me to do something very different - "a scroll in the early Irish style, complete with zoomorphic animal letters."
So I got to practicing and this is what I came up with.
The handwriting is in the insular majascule style, which was developed in the early 7th century by Irish monks and which was widely used through the mid 9th century. The illumination style mimics the style used in those same 7th to 9th century documents.
The red dots around important words are intended to be seen from a few feet away. Up close the eye sees dots. Farther away and the dots blur into a pinkish glow around the words, giving them emphasis.

The first is an award of honor, given to a teenaged girl who often babysits the many small children of the group, so that their parents can enjoy our events. The illuminated animals are Celtic-style dogs, with the two on the top left forming a zoomorphic letter A.

Click thumbnail for full-sized image.



The second is a piece done purely for display. The portraits are in the style of a page from the Book of Kells. The language is Latin, but should be fairly easy for folks here to translate - it is an obscure passage from the Bible: Armaments 2:9

Click thumbnail for full-sized image.

[Crasez58]

Hehe

Count to 3

[rredmond]

Always good stuff Stik.

--Ron--s