Zig-Zag Border Design

 This is a inch and a half wide scroll design composed of two, quarter-inch bars with the space between them filled with a simple, zig-zag pattern. This is a design that could easily be taught since it only uses a ruler. Once the primary zig-zag line is drawn in, smaller triangles are added on either side to fill in the spaces.

Color variations allows the scribe to go with either two or three colors plus a simple bit of whitework.

Southhampton Zoomorph Variations

This is a play on the variation of the Zoomorph that I created for the Southhampton Square tutorial. Once I had the original design for the letter form (the dog's head and feet) I could leave it as-is but I wanted to experiment with different forms of knotwork to weave in and around the shape.

Single Bar Border

This is another one of my simple early period, geometric-style scroll designs. The single bar is an inch and a half wide with two, quarter-inch frames bordering the column of diamonds and dots. Seems simple enough, right? This is one of the designs that could easily be laid out with nothing more than a ruler and a tracing guide for the circles.

This would be a great design for scribes who were starting out with painting or layout. There's plenty of space for people to practice just filling in basic shapes with color. Also, this would be a great scroll to help people practice their finishing work because the bars and diamonds could easily be filled with some whitework.

Geometric X Border with Capital scroll

This is another one of my early period, geometric scrolls. The inch-wide border on both ends with a  quarter-inch frame on the top and bottom. Because it was so simply constructed, I wanted to play with how color could be used to make the design really pop off the page.

Diamond and Daisy Bar variations

So whenever I create a scribal tutorial, I end up making the scroll design digitally within GIMP so that I can tear it apart and show how each step in the process works. One of the handy side-effects of this process is the ability to use that blank scroll blank for a number of other projects.

The first, blank page, I post up to my tracing folder on google drive (LINK HERE), but I can also can experiment with different color choices for the scroll's design without having to apply paint to paper. These color variations are basically just tests that never get posted because they're just ideas.

However, I thought this would be a great place to post the ideas and such so that people can see some options.

Girdle Book Jacket Project

he idea for this project is to create a book jacket in the design of a Medieval Monk’s Girdle Book that would hold ‘standard’ journals within it. Utilizing thin leather or imitation hide, it should be possible to create such an object that would carry a small field book for names, addresses, ideas and sketches. I do not want this to be a true ‘book’ as I want to be able to change out the pages once they have been filled.

Follow the project through THIS LINK

Persona Development and History

ot everyone in the SCA goes the monastic route. What can I say, I'm special. But when I decided to pull together the basic idea of a monk for the SCA I already had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to put him within history. For a while I could basically just tell anyone who had asked that I was a Benedictine monk from England who traveled abroad somewhere around the time of the Templars. Then, when I had more time and a better idea of the the various eras of history that interested me, I started to put down the specific events that I wanted my persona to have either witnessed, heard of, or was inspired by. This gave rise to a persona development document which you can find through THIS LINK.