This will be a short post as this was a scroll that I didn’t take as many progress photos of. But these are fun to document in the event that someone wants to look up a scroll I did and see what I was thinking when I came up with the design.
This was a Main de St. Nicolas awarded to their Excellencies Alasdair and Disa at July Coronation 2025. The words weren’t available when I was assigned the scroll and due to the time available for paint/calligraphy/etc, I decided to brave it and do the design and gilding, then add the words, and hope that everything worked out.
Every time I do a scroll, the first thing I do is go and check out the recipient’s wiki page(s) and look at what they have written about their personas. In this case, I was trying to come up with a simple design that I could gild in a fairly quick timeframe and that would have elements of 14th century Scotland and 10th/14th century Sweden. In the end, I looked at a lot of Scandinavian church ceilings and Scottish illuminated manuscripts and decided to play with the star shape that I saw referenced in medieval Swedish architecture again and again, while adding leaf elements that pop up in British manuscripts in that time frame.
Plus, I really wanted to use silver and see how the texture of a hot press watercolor paper I had would impact the gilding. (I was hoping that it would provide some ridging – it did.) Below is a picture of me warming up glair with a paper straw so I can place more silver down. This is where I learned it is impossible to try and take a photo of yourself doing this and not end up looking like a starry sky.
In the end, it worked out pretty well. Because it was silver, I had to be especially careful when working with it. It can be fairly easy to tarnish so I normally place a clean, soft cloth over the silver while I work on other parts of the image. In this case, I decided to add multiple layers of silver because I wanted it to be thick before I sealed it. Below right is a photo of how very ugly it looked with the first layer of silver down. To the left is a couple layers of silver in – I liked that adding silver seemed to smooth it a bit without losing the texture completely.
The colors I chose were purple, white, and green to go with Alasdair and Disa’s heraldic colors with a little splash of red as that color both pops up a lot in Swedish art and also is a bit of a nod to St. Nicolas’ alter ego. I recently purchased Winsor and Newton’s Tyrian purple watercolor so that was what I used here with varying levels of water. What appears black is actually that color with almost no water added – I added just a drop or two to lighten it for the interior of the star.
And here is the actual final result – seal and all. Thank you, An Tir livestream crew for streaming this so I could see it!
Notes on materials used:
Paper – Fabriano 1264 watercolor paper
Silver – LA Gold Leaf Silver (Transfer) – I want to note that I really, really hate using transfer leaf but the quality of the silver itself is gorgeous, so I sucked it up. The silver inside the star shape is a combination of leaf silver applied with miniatum ink and silver ink used to even it out. This was because I rushed the interior silver application – it would have been better to have waited a full 24 hours. Lesson learned. :)
Paints – Winsor and Newton Tyrian Purple, Beam Paints Pine, Beam Paints Cherry Magenta
Sibilia dell'Acqua 
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