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Showing posts from January, 2022

Illuminated Poem: Witch Insurance Provider of the Year

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 At last!  My third illuminated poem is finished. I had hoped to put them together as a video and narrate the story, as with the others, but the file size is too great.  So here are-low-resolution water-marked images.  As the intention is eventually to get the poems published, please do not copy them without consent. The poem was inspired by the claim of the Liverpool Victoria Insurance company to be 'The "Which?" insurance provider of the year". The style was inspired by speculation that Hieronymus Bosch may have begun his career as an illuminator.  If so, how might he have tackled my poem?

The longest-delayed scroll ever!

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 Within about an hour of discovering that she was to be Queen, (which must have been 19th October 2019), Martha Liljuros (SCA name Jacquelyna de Bellmont) asked me if I would do a scroll for her when she became Countess (a rank which would be bestowed on her at the end of her reign, which began in January 2020 and should have ended in June 2020).  In the event, because of the impossibility of organising a tourney for her successors, her reign lasted until today, (January 8th 2022) and only today was she made Countess and the scroll presented. So I had a long time to work on it!  I was inspired by an illumination from a manuscript of "The Triumph of the Virtues" by Jean Thenaud, held in the National Library of France.  It featured a woman riding on a unicorn.  As Jacquelyna's SCA arms feature a unicorn's head, I decided to adapt the original picture for her.  As it is clearly an illustration to a story, I wrote a story about Jacquelyna's efforts to heal her realm o