February 21, 2021

Strathmore Bristol paper 14×17”, India ink, Gouache
Calligraphy and Illumination by me. 
Words by Matthias Grunwald

Back in November, after I finished my previous scroll, I was assigned a Silver Wheel for Millicent Rowan.  I was rather excited since the assignments had been quite scarce due to the pandemic.  I realized that I was unfamiliar with the recipient and decided to do some research, starting with her Wiki page.  I emailed the person listed as the contact there and they gave me some information as well as a name of someone I could speak to for further insight on her.  I spoke with Matthias Grunwald and he told me that Millicent liked darker themes.  I found her blog and realized she was a quite accomplished scribe herself as well as being a very service oriented individual.  I felt I had a good jumping off point from here.

With the long lead time (February) in mind, I thought I could try a style completely different from my previous scrolls. My laurel recommended possibly doing a woodcut piece.  I especially liked this idea because I didn’t see any of this style in her blog and wanted to steer away from doing anything she already had done.  Diving into the research of woodcuts, specifically Albruchet Dürer, I came across “Saint George Killing the Dragon”.  I really liked this one as I felt it showed both strength and a touch of darkness.

Before tackling the actual scroll, I decided to do a practice piece from Dürer, in order to learn the style.  I chose the “Coat of Arms of Michael Behaim” as it was a bit more simplistic.  Although I was told that some people use modern pens to do woodcut pieces, I wanted to do this more period correct and chose to use ink with a crow quill nib.  I was happy that I did the practice piece first as it took a bit of time to work out line thickness and learn the pressure of the nib.  I felt much more comfortable after accomplishing that.

I laid out my scroll into two panels: the woodcut on the left side, and the words on the right.  I sketched out the borders, Silver Wheel, Millicent’s arms and the woodcut.  I knew I wanted to personalize the scroll by turning “Saint George” into Millicent herself.  I changed the face to be more feminine and added her hair and hat with some extra feathers.  Lastly I added her heraldry to the brooch on the horse.  

Once the pencil was all finished, I did the calligraphy and then the inking for the woodcut.  The amount of detail is somewhat deceiving to the naked eye, which created a much more time-consuming effort to be had.  I added the paint for the arms last.  It felt so incredibly strange to me to use such little paint in a scroll, but I really did enjoy tackling a totally new technique.