Pearl for Lady Marta de Lyon

Presented at Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival, March 2nd, A.S. LVIII (2024). 

Marta de Lyon does many types of art, but her area of expertise is opus anglicanum, a style of embroidery popular in the 13th and 14th Centuries that was so detailed and delicate that it imitated brushstrokes. This scroll is based on early 15th Century trompe l'oeil, a style of painting that imitates objects as if they are sitting on the page. I thought it was both very funny, and very apt to paint in a style that imitates life of a style of embroidery that imitates painting. 

In Progress:

I broke one of the first rules of scribal with this piece and made thing a bit harder for myself by starting with the shell instead of the background (it's usually the best idea to work from the background forward). I was worried about how difficult the technique would be though, so I knocked out the shell before moving on to other parts of the scroll. It worked out in the end.

Detail Photos:

I tried shading the objects before painting the gold pattern on the background. This ended up not looking quite right so I experimented and eventually settled on a very watered down wash that I painted over the gold. The final effect made it look like the gold in teh shadows was getting less light (which it was through the wash) and that's exactly what I was going for! 

Finished Scroll: