Intro When Pikachu [Pikachu shall be used instead of his SCA name] was announced for knighthood who has a Japanese persona, I offered to do his scroll as I already had an idea from the very beginning – I wanted to take inspiration from Japanese epics – to tell a tale with accompanying paintings. The first thing I had to do for this was find a scroll to paint on. While it would be cool to make my own scroll,…
“Gouache isn’t period.” It’s a statement that was often said to me as I started painting scrolls in the SCA and I hear it continue to be repeated to this day. Certainly, the word ‘gouache’ is a more modern invention – the term being applied to opaque watermedia for the first time in 18th CE France; however, the paint itself has been in use for centuries beforehand, just referred to under different terms. But let’s start from the beginning, what…
In the pursuit of being accurate, a member of the SCA may eventually come across a problem: the fabric they use is not accurate enough. Whether this is jumping from using polyester fabric to a more appropriate fabric or limiting your fabric purchases to fabrics with accurate motifs, everyone has a form of this problem pop up in their SCA career. I had switched from 100% cotton to 100% silk a few years ago as I was leaning more towards…
Over the last few months, I have been working on my illumination skills. For a long time, I have greatly enjoyed drawing and painting as it is very zen for me, so it was natural to jump to illumination as a new SCA hobby! Since I love Korean, my first big project involved creating a scroll based on the Illustrated manuscript of the Lotus Sutra (Miaofa lianhua jing), Volume 2 ca. 1340 (where you can find here). For this project, I…
The use of Koh (incense) and its many ingredients was brought to Japan from China and was originally used for “Ku-koh” for purifying Buddha and avoiding maliciousness. It is believed to have been brought in by the Buddhist monk, Gan-Jin (Jianzhen) around 750 AD. During the Heian period, this practice was developed into what we would call takimono and specifically Japanese kneaded incense balls were named neri-koh. These were made from woods, spices, and herbs, mixed with honey or plum…