Imperfectly Period

      It's a bit hard to tell, but the peacock eyes are all over-painted with iridescent paints.

    I helped at our barony's demo booth at a local faerie fair (think small fantasy themed Ren fair) and naturally spent most of the time painting charters.  The techniques were pretty simple, but I found it surprising and perhaps a little sad that many people found it fascinating.  I was puzzled on their reactions until a friend explained that many people stopped creating art of any kind after leaving school. People should be less afraid of sucking at something before getting good at it.  I'm still not there yet, but I'm not bad, either.

I attempted trompe l'oiel - or, as I like to call it, "squashed bug" - for my Daffodil in Any Medium entry this year.  It's hard to tell, but gold is used for the bark texture and highlights on the flowers.  The pearls also have a touch of shimmer to them. Two very different exemplars were used to try and create the effect of a painting of a daffodil. The most impressive part is that I'd spent the rest of the week making the 3 championship warrants for the event and only started my entry a day and a half before the competition.  The winner this year was Baron Aristophanes who distilled freaking daffodil whiskey because of course he did!             

Stumbled across this while going through old papers.  My first pseudo-attempt at calligraphy from about 30 years ago.

This December I had the chance to make a long-term service principality award for someone with a Slavic persona.  Honestly, I forgot the details so I may be misremembering, but basically I used a page from the Peresopnytsia Gospel as inspiration because it was appropriate for the recipient so if I use the incorrect term for the persona, apologies.   My Laurel, Yrsa Kettilsdottir, and the Principality Scribe, Dáma Maminka the Bohemian, kept poking me about documenting the process so you get a ton of bad photos because I'm not a photographer!    My spouse also got a few sheets of goatskin and I thought I'd use the smallest piece of it for this project.  I think it was about 7" square?  Not very big at all.  I used the flesh side because it's supposed to be smoother, but as you can see from this first picture it had a suede-like texture.     I read online that pumice stone is recommended for smoothing so I grabbed my unused...

  One of these days I'll remember to take photos in good light, but that is not this day.  I really like this one, due in no small part to the simplicity of the design.  I also love how annoyed Goliath looks as he's dying.  Unfortunately, I forgot the blood splatter that was supposed to come out of his neck!