Ursula

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

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

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.

Recently, the caid-scribes mailing list had a conversation about the kingdom's use of charters, that is, pre-printed award certificates that can be painted and personalized for individual award recipients. (Technically, Caid doesn't call these things "charters", but the scribes themselves seem confused about what word they DO use.) Somebody mentioned lack of experienced calligraphers as a reason that the kingdom can't handle more original scrolls. To me, this seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy: if one of your main ways of creating scribes is encouraging people to paint charters that have pre-printed text, you will inevitably end up with more experienced painters than experienced calligraphers.

I wonder if there's a way to make charters for calligraphers? I know that as a calligrapher, one of my main psychological barriers to taking on a new project is the tedium involved in ruling lines. If someone picked a standard calligraphic hand, pen size, and award text, kingdoms could mass-produce charters with blank lines. This could be done directly on the paper if folks were willing to trade pre-ruled lines for individual calligraphy, or budding calligraphers could use a translucent paper and place the pre-ruled lines underneath as a guide.