court baronies

These were a pair. The instruction I was given was that they should match. I didn't know much about the recipients at the time so  went with making them more like the traditional grants one sees than pages from books of hours. I think at the time there was a pretty heavy discussion going on on one of the email lists about how scrolls in general should look and that there should be a greater push to making them less book of hours like and more traditional medieval grant like.I was then and still am against pushing for any sort of regulation for the scribes as to what they can and cannot do from an artistic stand point.

One of the nice things about Drachenwald is the massive amount of freedom scribes have as far as the art of scrolls is concerned.This freedom allows scribes to test boundaries explore different styles and work through problems until they find their own style and comfort zone. We don't place restrictions on size of scroll vs importance of scroll, there are no weird sumptuary laws outside of the standard SCA ones and scribes can copy existing period pieces or come up with their own. It's exciting.

I did these in a style that was fairly new to me. I kept it simple but tried to make them pretty as well. It's easy now to see that as far as working with cadels goes I didn't really have a lot of experience, nor, at the time, was there a lot of information out there. I remember doing exhaustive internet searches looking for examples but at the time there were very few. This has changed significantly with museums and libraries now uploading whole medieval collections in high quality digital versions easily accessible to the public, some places even offer free PDF downloads of entire manuscripts. 

These were done with an oak-gall ink which has a blue tint to it, gold gouache on fabriano paper.