Iron Ink – Banner War 2014

This was my entry for the Iron Ink held at Banner War 2014.  Unfortunately for my House, I didn’t win, though it was said to be a close competition.

The object of the competition was to take the bit of prose they gave you (everyone received a different one) and either do the calligraphy on the blank parchment provided, or the art with room for the quote to be added later, or both.  I did the writing first, and then opened my little mini book of inspiration, tagged in a previous post, and it happened to land on a picture of a man hanging from a crane.  I couldn’t resist trying to re-create that around the provided quote since it involved ‘tasting flight’.  Here is the inspiration piece:

I also had brought documentation of the one place there is evidence of holes in the parchment being repaired, so I managed to get the nerve to cut a hole similar in shape to those in the pictures of the parchment repairs and stitch it up, almost dream catcher style.  Here is an example from this archived page from Uppsala University showing the extant pieces from one book:

If I had spent all of the allowed six hours on this project, it would have had a better chance,  but honestly,  it doesn’t look finished enough, and I need to do line work before starting calligraphy in the future, plus finishing lines on the freehanded painting would have helped.

Overall though, I am very proud of my entry because it shows my growth so far.  The Scribe said that I may have inspired a class with my addition of a repaired hole in my parchment which would be incredible!

*This was initially published on a different blog and moved here 10/2/25