The Story of a Silver Wheel in the Persian Style

I was sent an assignment for an event I've never been to, in a region I've not visited before and it necessitated that I ship my artwork to the Crown. All harrowing thoughts, seriously.

So I reached out to the contact listed on the assignment and got more information about one Lady Brit. An more information than I expected! So I started my research on a Safavid Persian scroll. This was useful as it greatly narrowed down the source material. In the British Library I found my mark - a Persian manuscript of the Tales of Sindbad, done in an Indian style.

My Exemplars: IO Islamic 3214 f.1r and f.46v

f.46v

f.1r

The hand is Nasta'liq - it is defined by short ascenders, long descenders, and a good deal of room between the beginning and end of a letter. I'm not sure that I was faithful to the hand in my exemplar, but it's a better faux Arabic than I've done before.

The text was very fun for me - I created text using one of the stories of Sindbad as a guide. The text tells the tale of the Court at Adventus, and Empress Caoilfhionn and Emperor Brennan assembling scholars and poets and having a discussion of what makes a person helpful. Many speak up and mention in turn the deeds that, it turns out, have all been performed by Brit. The Order speaks that they want her included and the Crown agrees, and so bestows the Silver Wheel.

The layout I chose is a combination of these two pages. Neither struck me as the right layout on their own, and I wanted something simple for this scroll, but striking. And so I landed at the layout of the finished piece:

A combination of two sources from the same book, adding diagonal text to balance the top and punctuating the piece with two diagonals giving more weight to the signature boxes for The Crown.

The materials are gouache and pergamenta, I did not use shell gold or gold leaf on this piece. In the original, the center of the medallion appears to be gold leaf, while the line work in both the medallion and the text page appear to be something closer to a mustard yellow. I decided that gold would stand better against the color of the perg, and would balance the metallic silver of the award itself, and so I used Holbein Rich Gold. I increased the proportion of the blue surround to give the medallion weight that wasn't just the gold in the center, and also to follow the wider center medallions sometimes seen in other Persian works.

The mockup for this layout was done in Photoshop. 

I'll confess - this is the first assignment I used the magic line tool on... and I love it. 


I've used a line tool to mark lines for my calligraphy before, but after Panteria I learned of the line tool for just making paint lines. I am extremely happy with how precise the lines are, and I see where my hand wavered and I released more paint than I wanted to - imperfections that I'm sure some can see but that I am ok with. 


The recipient: I was told that Brit prefers Persian, sometimes 
Landsknecht, sometimes Viking, and sometimes 13th century English. I took a chance that she prefered Persian and went that route. I'm glad I did. :)