Wedding gargoyles

So I was working on the piece shown in my previous post, and sending photos to the client so she could see my progress, when the lady's fiancee reached out to me with a request. She wanted to surprise my client with their combined heraldic arms in a "full achievement", which is to say the shield, supporters on either side holding up the shield, a crest on top, and a mount and motto underneath. She had a number of requests, all of which were meaningful to them as a couple, and asked if they're was any way I could pull it off. 

So I did.

First up was a mockup where I sketched everything in pencil, repeatedly, and then once I was satisfied,  outlined it all in sharpie. The circles will be flowers in the final piece, including the one where a helmet would go on the crest. 

Tracing the final design into my ground. I can't remember now whether I used vellum or perg, but I'm pretty sure it was vellum. 

Let the painting begin! What you're seeing is called "impaled arms", where you either split the two devices right down the middle and then stitch them together, as I did here, or you squish the two devices to take up half the space, but still show everything on each device. So you'd have a whole dragon and scroll instead of halves. 

I had a terrible time getting this flower to come out right, and I'm still not really happy with it even though the client loved it. This is just an in progress photo, though, so more will be added to it as we go.

I wanted to include this pic mainly to show the mixing palette in the corner of the photo. Color theory is kinda fascinating, and I'm really pleased with the gray I ended up with. I took two warm colors, an orangey red and another orangey yellow, but then a cool blue, and mixed them until I got a deep black. Adding white gave me a soft off slate blue-gray.

Side note: understanding color theory gives you so much more control over your palette! I don't usually like to mix colors from scratch, but i think I'll be doing it more often from here on out, because this worked so well. 

All the base colors laid in. Now it's time to shade and highlight the gargoyles. 

I was really, really pleased with how these gargoyles came out. I used a thin wash of a color I'd put together for the flower in the crest and applied that to the wing membranes, and it worked beautifully. I was so excited. 

Another side note: after my work on the heraldry was done, I switched to a size 9 brush. This is gargantuan compared to what scribes usually use, typically in the 0 to 000 range. But it gave me much smoother strokes and allowed me to work more quickly. 

I got bored and thought that the arms could use a little detail work themselves. This is known as diapering and was a traditional way to fill in large areas of color. 

Finally, it was time to outline everything and put the motto in place at the bottom:

The words are from their wedding vows, and come from traditional ancient Roman weddings.

All in all, I was happy with everything except the large flower at the top... but I couldn't figure out a way to make it look good without adding more and more to it until it turned to mud. I was better off stopping where I did rather than ruining it completely. 

The client and her wife loved it, regardless, and the looks on their faces were a joy to see. Plus we had ice cream together! So really, a good day all around.