Drawing a Dozen Different Dragons

Much of this blog is dedicated to the Heraldry I draw for specific clients. Aside from the Pennsic Reference Boards, I haven’t talked about the hours I spend at Pennsic and at home, consulting on heraldic art via Oscar and the Baby Heralds FaceBook group.

In addition to that, I am the Herald who envisioned the newest version of the Traceable Heraldic Art Project. Not long after I began working on it, Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin stepped in to help. He has software that can convert line art into vector art, and the server space to host HeraldicArt.org.

Vector art is different from scans of line drawings because it is scaleable. If you take a photograph to a copy shop and make it twice as large, some of the details will blur due to the limitations of the DPI (Dots Per Inch) of the photo. Vector art is different because it can be enlarged and shrunk on a computer and not become blurry.

Making the new Traceable Art in vector format allows the artwork to be reproduced at any size or scale, from combat shields to banners and tabbards or list tree shields. Vector art allows people to have artwork that is more complicated than they can draw.

This project is enormous. It incorporates most of the Pennsic Traceable Art, as well as all the backgrounds for heraldic shields (called Field Divisions). Additionally, we are including heraldic artwork created by artists around the world.

One set of artistic compilations was created in 1994 by Herald Torric inn Bjarni. His work is incredibly detailed, but his use of shading and hatching are difficult to translate into vector art. One of my tasks as an artist is to take his artwork and turn it into drawings that are easily converted to vectors. This is a huge task, because he compiled his drawings in a way to save space and paper, often using dashed lines and small notes to indicate how alternate versions of a creature would be drawn. These are scans from a few of his drawings.

I have scanned these versions of dragons, and the other pieces that allow different variants to be drawn. The dragon has four legs, while the wyvern has only two. Additionally, Torric made notes on basilisks and cockatrices, which I also drew. These combinations resulted in drawing a baker’s dozen different variations of the same dratted dragon.

Here are the first two dragons. The dragon on the left is Sejant, or in a seated pose.

The dragon on the right is Sejant Erect, or sitting with a raised limb.

In contrast, these two wyverns have only two legs. They are also displayed as Sejant and Sejant Erect.

With Torric’s note of the cockatrice head and the beginning of wings in the thumbnail drawing, I was able to piece together drawings. A cockatrice is a wyvern with the head of a cock.

A basilisk  is only different from a cockatrice because it has a dragon’s head at the end of its tail.

After drawing eight pictures of similar creatures, I was delighted to draw these dragons Couchant, or crouching. The right dragon is Coucant Erect, or crouching with one limb raised.

And here are another two versions of the Couchant dragons, with their wings folded. Having many variations of heraldic animals can be helpful when artists are placing images within limited space.

Finally, here is the dragon Dormant, or sleeping. The Hogwarts motto “Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus” seems appropriate here, since you should never tickle a sleeping dragon.

I enjoy ending posts with a bit of humor, but a recent change to heraldic registration laws has removed sleeping animals from the list of registerable charges. Sleeping animals are hard to distinguish from one another, breaking the First Rule of Heraldry: Can I Identify That Shield in Combat/ The Barony of l’Ile du Dragon Dormant of Montreal, Canada features a sleeping dragon. Since its’ heraldry is already registered, the Sleeping Dragon stays.

All About Paint

Mundanely, I went to school for Architecture. I took a number of artistic classes including photography and painting. I fell in love with acrylic paint, which was fast-drying, easy to work with, and could be cleaned with water. I have artistic friends who swear by oil paint. (I tend to swear at oil paint because it takes days to dry!)

While acrylics were nice, they had a tendency to crack and chip if applied to a flexible surface. My LARP interests drew me to Liquitex Paint, which is flexible when dry. Panther Primitive Tents recommend Liquitex Paint for adding details to their canvas tents. They recommend  watering down the Liquitex to a ratio of three parts water to one part paint.

Also, this stuff keeps indefinitely. Back in 2009, I was planning to attend the World Science Fiction Convention is Montreal. Author Seanan McGuire was also attending, and I’d been chatting with her via LiveJournal for about a year. I really wanted to make her a piece of Fan Art to thank her for making me giggle with silly posts. She said she loved the color orange and My Little Pony, so I painted a pony onto a purse I bought secondhand. This was the base coat: I’d printed a pony picture, cut it out, and traced the outline with paint.

This is the finished purse. I painted white highlights over Applejack’s hair, and added a black outline. This is exactly the same technique I use to paint heraldry onto shields. In fact, the bottle of yellow paint in this photo is the same one I’m using today. (The white bottle gave up its ghost for the Pennsic Heraldry Boards.)

Painting is fun; it’s like tracing with a brush. And if you mess up with Liquitex, just take a piece of damp paper towel to the bad section, remove the offending paint, and draw the lines again. Painting isn’t hard; it’s tricky. Knowing the tricks makes all the difference between the work of a novice verses a master.

Another neat aspect of this paint is that adding water makes it act like watercolor. This means you can do semitransparent washes and shading. Once Liquitex paint is dry, it is permanent. I have painted canvas Heavy List tabards with this paint, thought I needed to add the Liquitex Fabric Medium to make it machine washable.

List Tree Shields

Twice a year in the spring and fall, each Kingdom in the SCA hosts Crown Tournament. This happens a few weeks after the Coronation of the new King and Queen, and determines who the next Prince and Princess will be. (My home, the East Kingdom, has not yet had a Queen by Right of Arms, or two monarchs of the same gender. Yet!)

Crown Tournaments will usually host between forty and eighty competitors and their consorts. Combatants are divided into pools, usually with the top two or four advancing to the next round. The period way to display who would be fighting where is to use list trees with small shields displaying the competitors’ arms.

This is when my work as an Armory Herald really makes a difference, and why it is so important for fighters to have Registered Devices with the SCA College of Heralds. While fighters are allowed to compete in Crown without registering their name and arms with the Heralds in the East Kingdom, they are strongly encouraged to register before the tournament.

These are the arms of my friend Þórin Úlfsson: Azure, a dragon and a stallion combatant argent.

When he asked to fight for me at Crown Tournament in November, I insisted that he and I submit his name and arms as soon as possible. They are currently working their way through the registration process, and should pass before Pennsic 46.

This list tree shield is 10″ by 12″.

 

In contrast, these are the arms of my friend and first Heavy List instructor, Baron Wulfhere of Stonemarche: Per fess argent and sable, a wolf’s head erased contourny and a clenched gauntlet counterchanged.

I made his a list tree shield because he left his at home  last Crown Tourney. I wanted to make sure that wouldn’t happen again. He may think I’m being silly, but I feel like arriving at the tournament without your shield tree is only slightly better than arriving without your helm!

Solving Problems with Design: A LARP Vest

I’m an avid member of the Society of Creative Anachronisms,  but I was a Live Action Role Player (LARPer) for a decade and a half before I changed hobbies. This vest is both the most beautiful and the most complicated piece of fabric engineering that I have created. The Tree of Life embroidery alone took a month.

 I refer to this piece as engineering, because it’s not simply a costume. I needed to have a lot of pockets to hold my notebook, components, tags, and props. I’d originally carried a shoulder bag, but it didn’t have enough pockets or enough volume. The front of this vest has four separate flat pockets, and two larger cargo pockets on the sides.

The large cargo pockets measured 12″ deep, 7″ wide, and about 1.5″ wide. I could easily fit 40 bean bag “packets” into each of the two side pockets. At some point in a large battle, I would be scrambling to transfer packets from the left pocket, where I held my bow, to the right pocket, where I grabbed my packet ammo. Friends sometimes snagged packets out of my pockets in a pinch.

All of these pockets were extremely useful, but I feel the real genius of the project was making the vest adjustable. LARPs run in the spring, summer, and fall, and temperatures will vary from 40 to  90 degrees. I needed a single costume item that I could wear over minimal summer clothing, but would still work layered over an undershirt, overshirt, and chainmail, while still being able to throw a cloak over the whole ensemble. To that end, I put velcro strips in the belt, both to be adjustable and so I could quickly change my under-layers. The top half of the vest is lined protect the embroidery.

Applying Graphic Design to Heraldry: Aggressive vs. Passive Elements

May of the Heraldic Devices I draw are straightforward requests like “I want a lion and a boar” or “I want a cat with a book in blue and white.” One of the few real challenges I’ve had was a client who wanted a stag’s head within an “O.” She didn’t like how aggressive the stag in the Pennsic Traceable Art Project looks. The Traceable Art stag is shown on the right.

This stag’s head is designed to evoke aggression, because heraldic shields were originally used to identify their owners on the field of battle. Notice how many diagonal lines it has: the shape of the eyes and brows, the ears, the snout and the neck lines are all jagged diagonals, similar to icicles or carnivore teeth. Even the curves of the stag’s horns are diagonals.

The counterpoint to aggressive diagonal lines is using soft circles. (Horizontal and vertical lines are more neutral.) So I doodled some circles, trying to make a stag’s head with as many circular elements as possible.  I made a point of keeping the head and the circle of the horns as equal in size as possible, since the entire head needed to fit in an “O.” If either the horns or the head had greater size, it would make the resulting design seem unbalanced.

Deliberately making an unbalanced design jolts the viewer out of their comfort zone, and is a good way to communicate aggression.

The final version required me to redraw the “O” in a more period font. As per the client’s request, I colored the “O” green and the stag’s head red.