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…
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…