Old Fashioned Thank You

In Dragon's Mist, we've been blessed with a very generous contributor to our SCA activities, who doesn't personally play. His Excellency Finn's grandmother has been an amazing sponsor for several years, and this past year, we decided it would be nice to send her a very special Thank You.

Finn, himself reenacts a persona from Norman 11th Century England, and so we thought that a thank for that period would be appropriate. I'd never done anything in that style, so upon discussion HE and I decided to use the most well known Norman art source, the Bayeux Tapestry as reference.

So I searched through the plates and found one that I liked on which to base my design.

I decided to use the building on the left for a framing mechanism, and add the remainder of the illustration into the entablature. Once again, I used tracing paper to begin, and flesh out the design before transferring it to the nicer paper. (Upon reflection of this project, I wish I'd taken a bit more time to make this more even on the paper).

 

Now I ink it out with a Micron pen,getting it ready to paint. 

A close up of the art and text, the text taken directly from the reference peace. 

 With the addition of the text, done by the hand of Helena.

And with the addition of color blocking: I decided to make the structure very pale, and varied like earthen structures. and the use only colors in the illustration as found in the original example.

 

I was pretty happy once the shading and white work were done.