Re: Work In Progress--Deryni Action Figure Project (was Duncan Action Figure)

[Evie]

If it's Alaric, she wouldn't need to worry about liturgical colors at all, even after his darkling phase.  Not unless something tragic happened to Richenda and Alaric felt a sudden calling to the priesthood, which somehow I just can't imagine!   

And at least all my clothing for Action Figure Duncan folds and stuffs neatly into a gallon sized Ziploc bag for storage.  Which is more than I could say if I started to work on a 1:6, 1:12, or even 1:24 size Rhemuth Castle!     I'm glad you like the cassock and hood.  A brand new pillowcase was sacrificed to make that.    (At $2.50 per pillowcase at Walmart, buying their cheapie two-pillowcase set, it cost me less to buy that then it would have for me to drive across town to the fabric store to buy half a yard of fabric, and the remaining pillowcase in the set matches my black microfiber body pillow.)

[Jerusha]

Yes, he would be.  So, when do you plan to start on that project?   

Um, maybe after my "do all the heraldry of the Eleven Kingdoms in needlepoint" project?

It might be awhile. 

[Evie]

If I mail you the hardanger fabric, could you do those needlework banners in 1:6 scale? 

[Jerusha]

If you also send a replacement set of eyes and some very nimble elves, we'll talk.   

[Evie]

If you also send a replacement set of eyes and some very nimble elves, we'll talk.   

I'm all ears.  So to speak.   

[Alkari]

Send me your design for the McLain banner and I'll see what I can do when I find where I have put all my needlepoint stuff.  Though even on a 1:6 scale, and worked on very fine linen, it will probably end up the equivalent size to a wall-hanging. 

[Jerusha]

ROFL @ Evie!  I yield! 

I've never tried my hand at petitpoint, but I think that would work out to be close to the right scale.  Unfortunately, I don't have a charted design.  I have the drawing of the McLean shield on Volume 1 of the Deryni Archives, and there is a clear description of the shield colours during the funeral in DC, but I have not actually produced the picture to work from.  I had software that would convert a picture to a workable graph, but I never used it much and alas, it was for my old Windows 95 machine and on a floppy disc as well!

I'm sure there is more modern software out there, and I should probably start looking for it!  There were companies that would produce a graph if you sent them the picture, but I wouldn't do that without KK's permission, as it is her intellectual property.

[Evie]

Send me your design for the McLain banner and I'll see what I can do when I find where I have put all my needlepoint stuff.  Though even on a 1:6 scale, and worked on very fine linen, it will probably end up the equivalent size to a wall-hanging. 

A wall-hanging?  Um, you did see that's a 1:6 scale and not a 6:1 scale, right?   

[Evie]

 I have the drawing of the McLean shield on Volume 1 of the Deryni Archives, and there is a clear description of the shield colours during the funeral in DC, but I have not actually produced the picture to work from.  

There's a drawing?!  

Actually, if I just had the heraldic blazon to work with, I could figure out what it ought to look like, but I can't recall where (if anywhere) the actual blazonry is written out in the books.  I know that the McLain arms are blue and white, with a sleeping lion on it (color either not specified or not coming to mind right now) and some red roses, but I don't know in what particular configuration they all fit on the escutcheon (shield).  What would help would be some sort of description like "On a shield azure, a lion dormant proper, and in chief argent, three roses gules."  Or whatever the heraldic specifics are, obviously.  I keep thinking I've seen something of that sort in one of the novels, but heck if I can find it!  

Then again, if there's an actual drawing somewhere, then assuming it's emblazoned correctly, a picture is worth a thousand words....  

There's a description somewhere of the Cassani standard too, which if I remember correctly would be (in laymen's terms) like a long swallow-tailed (i.e. forked) banner that is divided lengthwise into blue and silver (or white, since heraldically they're interchangeable), with red roses sprinkled over that, and the Haldane gold rampant lion on a crimson field added on at the pole end, though whether it takes up that entire end of the standard or just the top corner of it (like the blue starry canton does on the US flag) is less clear.  Or at least it is in the second-hand description of this standard that I found online.  It might be perfectly clear in the novel's description, but again, although I think that was taken from TBH or TKJ, I don't have either book handy to look up the actual phrasing.  I did a rough sketch of it using MS Paint once, but given my MS Paint skills, it looks pretty dire.

[Alkari]

Yes, I did see that it's a 1:6 scale     But if you are talking of a 'banner' equivalent to 2ft x 4 ft, then we are only talking about a 2"x 4" design.  That does not allow for very much fine detail in the design, even in petit point.   Hence my comment about a wall hanging  :p    But it should be possible to get a reasonable McLain lion and roses even at that scale, as they would not require very detailed shading.  I second Jerusha's comments about the design - will check DC and Deryni Archives when I get home.

[Evie]

Yes, I did see that it's a 1:6 scale     But if you are talking of a 'banner' equivalent to 2ft x 4 ft, then we are only talking about a 2"x 4" design.  

Nope.  Look at it this way...a 12" male action figure represents a man 6 feet tall.  (OK, there's actually a 11.5" to 12" range in male figures, but for the sake of simplicity we'll assume the standard 12" figure and round up to six feet, or 72 inches.)  Using the ratio, if "1" is equal to 72", then dividing that by 6 yields 12" for the action figure height, yes?  OK, now that we've double-checked our scale, then let's apply the same scale to an object.  If we have a banner that's 2' x 4', then the short side will be 24 inches (2 feet = 24 inches) divided by 6, or 4".  And the long side will be 48 inches (4 feet = 48") divided by 6, which is equal to 8".  So that means the miniature banner would need to be 4" x 8", which is an easier size to work with in needlepoint, I should think.

What you were thinking of is 1:12 scale, in which there's an exact equivalence of "1 foot of real scale = 1 inch of miniature scale."  I suspect 1:12 scale dollhouses are popular not just because they're space saving compared to 1:6, but also because that's a much easier scale to work with for people who don't want to bother with working out the maths in their head, or who get turned around as I tend to do and forget to convert those pesky feet into inches first before doing the division, and then end up with wildly skewed results.  

And this, by the way, is why all of Duncan's clothes so far have been "measured by eyeball" rather than with a measuring tape or a ruler!  I hate maths!   

[Alkari]

OK, but what size do you actually WANT the banner to be?    Are you thinking of a 2'x 4'equivalent, i.e. 4"x 8"?   Or did you want something smaller?

There are some good heraldic designs online for "lions couchant" that could be used, like these:-






Although none of them look particularly like a 'sleeping' lion!  Is the description in DC "couchant" or "dormant" ?  (Haven't got my books with me).   There are some designs for "dormant, like this:



But I do think that a nice Corwyn gryhon in rich green silks would be fun to do 

[Evie]

KK usually just says "sleeping lion," given that not all of her readers can be counted upon to know heraldic terms, but the proper heraldic term for that posture would be "dormant."  And your second lion in that post looks extremely familiar to me; that's the one my DH uses on his SCA fighting shield and his painted banner!    IIRC it's line art from The Art of Heraldry by Fox-Davies, though I could be mistaken on DH's source.  He had his SCA device long before we met.  DH's lion is "couchant" rather than "dormant," so that third lion in your post would be more accurate for Duncan's device.

One problem is that I don't know what color that lion is.  Is it gold?  Red like the roses?  Is it "proper" (i.e. colored like a real line, with some leeway for the artist because real lines come in various shades of color, but one can assume a large tawny cat with either some similar colored or black mane)?  Unless KK has hidden that detail somewhere in the novels and I'm not remembering where it is, it's going to be hard to create a banner for Duncan.  Maybe she'll be at Sunday chat and can answer that question for us.  

My guess is that Duncan's escutcheon is similar to your top one, only with the shield being blue at the bottom and white or silver at the top, the roses being red as in your sample, and the lion being some unknown color at this point.  But since I don't know if those field divisions are accurate, that's just a wild guess.  It could be that the lion is in a blue field within a white border that is sprinkled with roses.  Or that the shield is divided vertically or diagonally, etc.  We know from HD that the Cassani livery is sky blue and silver (and given how expensive, not to mention impractical, genuine cloth of silver would have been to purchase for an entire army, not to mention keep untarnished in battle conditions, I'll assume KK means "pale light grey"), so it's possible that Jared's shield device reflected those colors as well, although that would have been due to artistic preference, since there wasn't a heraldic differentiation between "blue" and "sky blue" in the Middle Ages yet (unless of course "bleu-celeste" as a heraldic color came into vogue centuries earlier in the Eleven Kingdoms, but that would be up to the Author), and "argent", while literally translating to "silver," is quite often painted in as white when the heraldry is emblazoned on something like a shield or banner.

So as for size....  Gee, I dunno.  4" x 6", maybe?  That's about the same ratio as my baronial banner, but scaled down to a reasonable size for an action figure.  And if an extra bit of fabric is left at the top (the flat edge), it could be folded over to create a casing for a wooden dowel that would allow for something like this:



That's a versatile "hanger" for a banner that allows it to be hung up on a wall, or suspended from a pole with a hook, or any number of other means of display.  My SCA banner used to hang with DH's from cup hooks in the wooden beams of our Great Hall/living room, on either side of the fireplace.  DH also uses them to mark which pavilion is ours when we're at an SCA camping event.  Lots of handy uses for a good banner!  

[Evie]

And here's that very crude MS Paint sketch of the McLain battle standard that I worked up from a description I found online:



I ought to be banned from working in MS Paint to protect the vision and mental health of innocent bystanders.  There is probably some far more artful way of depicting this standard working from the same description, though graphics design is most definitely not my strong suit!    And again, depending on the actual description in the novel rather than the paraphrase I found online, that red portion at the left of the battle might not go all the way down to the bottom edge, but might be a canton instead, covering only the upper left corner of the standard like the starry blue field on the US flag.

Here's how a heraldic rose would traditionally be depicted.  Not that it's not the fancy, many-petaled sort of rose that we've got in gardens today, since those were cultivated to look that way over many centuries:



And here is one that is specifically "gules" (i.e. red):



The medieval five-petaled heraldic rose looks like this one:

[Jerusha]

Duncan's is similar to the top one, but on the drawing of the shield on the Deryni Archives cover, the roses are on the bottom half and the lion on the top.  And you're right, I don't think I've found a desciption of the colour of the lion anywhere.