January journal: scribal

[ursula]

yhlee asked how I got into "medieval looking illustrations".

The short answer is the SCA. The long answer is middle school.

My family moved across the country the summer before I started sixth grade. We ended up in a place outside Portland, Oregon that was in the middle of a transition from being a little country town full of Christmas-tree farms to being a rich suburb. My middle school was a brand-new building in the middle of clear-cut, empty fields in the middle of nowhere: it was on unincorporated land, outside the city proper. The closest thing was the euphoniously named Wanker's Corner Store. Everybody had to take a bus to get there.

The middle school had blue and purple and teal carpet whose zigzags looked like they were moving if you stared at them for too long, and open-plan architecture. The library was in the center of a sort of atrium, looked down on by the upper ring of classrooms. Nowhere was private and there were no trees on campus. I didn't know anybody who cared about books or making things up, and I felt simultaneously exposed and trapped.

The middle school art teacher offered a calligraphy elective. I remember looking at a display of student calligraphy projects in the atrium, one of those sixth-grade lunch periods that I had nowhere to go, and being astonished and jealous that this school could contain a beautiful thing. (One of those projects must have been vandyhall's, which means it would have been good by absolute standards, as well as middle-school ones.)

Of course I signed up for the calligraphy class as soon as I could. We learned italic and uncial, using dip pens. My first official project was the phrase "I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me," from the Kipling story; it came out well except for an unfortunate ink blot.

Somewhere in there, I met vandyhall. She was a year ahead of me and missing a lot of school because of illness, so we didn't encounter each other all that often, but I admired her greatly. In high school, we became actual friends and she drew me into the SCA. I knew the SCA was an opportunity to use my calligraphy & illumination skills--indeed, as a new SCA member my ambition was to become a C&I Laurel, though I ended up getting drawn into heraldry instead.

These days, I muddle along as an intermediate SCA scribe: I'm too confident in my art and research skills to count as a beginner, but not practiced enough and not knowledgeable enough about medieval materials to be anywhere near expert.

Comments

[ursula]

I am pretty sure my internet self seems taller, too!

I think I am very slightly older than aryanhwy, if that helps in visualization?

[kareina]

I am convinced that she and I are the same age, too, even though I *know* it isn't true.