heraldic emergency

So, I'm sitting at home, goofing off, not even thinking about the SCA when I get an IM from our group herald.

There is something potentially wrong with Lady Derega's arms submission.

"Christ have mercy, the last thing we need is a complication now!" I've already submitted the things for her, including cutting my own check rather than making her pay for them.

So, long story short, the way she has them drawn shows the bird more or less from the top down in silhouette. The drawing actually needs to be voltir, which is very clearly a side view, not a top down one.

"Not now!" I said to myself. Never mind that I didn't catch that before, the last thing I needed was to tell my first heraldic client that I botched up the drawing check on her submission.

So, anyway, we wind up holding an emergency "right this minute" pow-wow at Deraga's house with myself and Kazimir, as well as a choice heraldry book from Kaz'es collection.

I don't think any of us are what you want to call "passive" personalities. In fact, the three of us in a room together are three very different, but definitively type-A personalities. So, rather than a calm, sit-down conversation, there was a lot of walking around, a lot of talking and a lot of... enthusiastic conversation as we talked about the college of heralds, heraldic policy, and the percent likelihood that someone in the college would make an issue of this.

Derega wound up fixing the issue herself by adding to the head to make it more of a profile and less of a top-down perspective (sorry, I didn't get a photo). A small change, but if push comes to shove, there is enough there for Kaz and I to argue with in it's favor.

Fortunately, we all walked away happy, and with a good game plan. And, most critical (to me, anyway) no time lost.

Okay, crisis averted. Back to the rest of my life.

Lord Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"God save the King!"

Breaking in my new paints

Well, I finally got to sit down and try out my new paint set that my wife got me for Christmas. Definitely a new experience dealing with paint right out of the freshly opened tube. I think some of it had separated out, because I had to mix it a little. Still, all told, I wasn't unimpressed with what I had to work with.

AOA-1/11/14-Incomplete

There is definitely a lot of cleanup work to be done here, and I am not entirely sure what to do about the background of the letter, but that will come as I work with it some more. I also need to clean up the top blue flower, has an accident with it and now I need to clean up blue (of all colors) from over top of green and yellow.


Lord Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"God save the King!"

Paint and arrows

So, tonight Lady Derega, Lady Liliana, myself and my son all congregated to work some more on arrows. It wasn't what I call a terribly fast pages effort, but it was good conversation, and good time spent with Derega acting as host to the evening's activities.

The major effort tonight was painting sets of a dozen arrows so that the set matches. I took first crack at it, and got to learn the ins and outs of the rig that had been assembled by a Namron archer from wood and the cannibalized parts of a sewing machine. the question wasn't so much one of period as noticeable, which is what I was aiming for.

In the interim, Derega worked on the fletching chopper, readying white/white/red sets, and I Liliana did both for a while before the work meeting came to a close.

Liliana was halfway through her set when thing wrapped up. I managed to get my dozen complete, however, and this is what some of them looked like as they were resting up against the wall to dry.

Lord Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"God save the King!"