Gina's Scroll

The Final Copy

I received this assignment as a personal commission from the Queen. Naturally, I couldn't turn down the challenge. I was told that the recipient had lived in Okinawa in real life and had a Japanese/West African persona.

I've had the pleasure of meeting this lovely individual. One of the nicest people that I've ever met.

This was a hard assignment because of all of the elements involved. I tried to find resources on West African art but didn't really find anything that inspired me. I reached out to Ryouko'jin of the Iron Skies in the East Kingdom for help on Facebook. He went through a long list of artwork for me to look at. At the end, I found myself drawn to the painted panels.

Materials Used:

Stonehenge Aqua Cold Press Black paper
- Not period, but was chosen to replicate a black, lacquer surface like the extant
FineTec Pearlescent Colours
- Not period, the paint was used because it matches the pearlescent colors of the extant
Amsterdam Acrylic Ink in gold
- Not period, it is acrylic ink that I chose because of its opacity
Faber-Castell Artist Pen, black
- Not period, but it's filled with black India ink, which is used to add accents to the piece
Zig Fudebiyori Pigment pen
- Not period, it is a pigment pen filled with archival-quality, water-based pigment in white
Pencil and eraser
- Partially period, the graphite pencil is period, but the white eraser is not. The period eraser is made out of bread.
Ruler
Paint brushes

Original Words by Amanda Rae (Wol Bei)

Honor is due worthy subjects from a true King and Queen. Therefore, do We, Afshin and Yasmin, King and Queen of Atlantia, award arms to the excellent Jina Kinjo for faithful service to the Crown, cheerful companionship as part of our retinue and skill in creating beautiful garments. From this day onwards, this gentle shall have the right to bear arms registered with the college of heralds without let or hinderance. Done this 9th day of August, Pennisic 50.

Japanese Translation by Hector Baez (Morita No Daichi)

名誉は、真の王と女王から与えられるに値する臣民です。したがって、私たち、Afshin and Yasmin, アトランティアの王と女王、私たちは「武器賞」を授与します優れたものには、Jina Kinjo 王室への忠実な奉仕のために、私たちの従者の一員としての陽気な交友と、美しい衣服を作る技術。この日以降、この紳士は、何の妨害もなしに、伝令大学に登録されたこれらの「紋章の授与」を正しく示すことができるものとします。8月9日に行われたPennisic 50。

Testing Page for Paints and Inks

I decided to create a "test page" for all my inks and paints to see how they would look on this paper. I particularly love how my Fine Tec paints look on this background. I'm glad I made a test page. The squiggles on top under the word "Amsterdam" with the steak of paint going through them are places where I was attempting to recreate the pearlescent effect using a combination of ink and paint. I wasn't very happy with how it turned out, so I decided to just use the pearlescent paint to replicate mother-of-pearl shell.

Practicing the Technique

I isolated the panel that I wanted to recreate and began to practice the technique to make the flowers. I ended up using medicine cups as circle guides, which worked really well.

In Progress

This was the only photograph I took of my work in progress for this scroll. I mostly free-handed everything with my paintbrush. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

The art

The art features what I -think- are wisteria blossoms and leaves. I wasn't able to identify the birds. I kept adding more and more flowers and leaves until it felt "right."

The text

I wrote the text in Japanese vertically using the Fudebiyori pigment pen. This isn't a period technique. A period technique would be to use a paintbrush to paint my letters in. I didn't use this option because I didn't have a paintbrush in the size that I needed to complete this assignment.

Here is a small guide on how to read Japanese. I wrote the words vertically, and is meant to bread in a top-to-bottom fashion, right-to-left.

I wrote the words in modern Japanese because I'm not as good with my hiragana as I'd like to be. Hiragana would have been the writing style that would have been appropriate for the period. While I do have experience writing in both katakana, which the scroll is written in, and in hiragana, I didn't feel that I would be able to obtain the results that I wanted with the tools that I had.

A Japanese lacquerware produced and exported at the request of the Society of Jesus. Azuchi–Momoyama period, 16th century, Kyushu National Museum found on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_lacquerware

The Extant

The extant is a gorgeous icon made out of Japanese lacquer. I chose this piece as the inspiration for the artwork because I felt that the patterns of the lacquerware resembled the pattern of the recipient's kimonos.

From what I was able to research on the topic, this extant may have traveled to West Africa.

Final Thoughts

The FineTec paints created an amazing pearl effect, but no contrast
- I love the FineTec paints that I bought. It's surprisingly opaque and worked very well with this project. A drawback of this paint is that it looks very flat. I had to go in to add high lights and lowlights.
I need higher quality paint brushes in smaller sizes
- A major drawback that I had in this project was the lack of good, high-quality paintbrushes that could give me a fine point for calligraphy. I tend to go through a lot of paintbrushes working through my projects, and I'm slow to replace the ones that have become gummy, broken, or otherwise unusable. I have a relatively small collection of paintbrushes that I hope to remedy one of these days. Right now, it's not something that I can afford.
My gold ink is turning gummy
- A major problem that I ran into was my gold acrylic ink drying out inside of the siphon. This would produce a long, stringy substance that can be picked up by my paintbrush as a glop of ink. Thankfully, the glops that I accidentally picked up were small, and were unnoticeable
I left the graphite guidelines in place instead of erasing
- This was a deliberate decision because there was no real benefit in me erasing my pencil marks, and I would increase the chances of discoloring the paper. The pencil marks are virtually invisible unless you're within 1 foot of the scroll. The normal viewing range for this scroll would probably be 3-5 feet.

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