This 4th & 5th of July (2018), will be selling my artwork at the craft fair in Leeds for the 50th Anniversary of the International Medieval Congress @imc_leeds. Looking forward to it — never been to Leeds, and the medieval events look really interesting.
Needed some more relatively-authentic medieval stained glass panels, so I thought about doing a series of monograms. First I needed some alphabets. These came up on the Internet and were obviously photocopies from a 19th C reference book.
They look nice but are a bit too ornate.
This last one is a lot more promising as being cuttable in glass. It’s labelled “14th C Richard II Westminster”, so presumably from a document held there. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain all the letters so I had to improvise an “M”. Been slowly working my way through the alphabet – tracing each letter in Adobe Illustrator to create a vector version, and then simplifying and adapting the designs to make it work in glass.
Here is my interpretation of the L and Chi-Rho as finished pieces.
The L (and the Chi-Rho) are both available on Etsy now. If still available, I’ll be bringing them and the patterns for the rest of the alphabet to Leeds for the craft fair.
About the alphabets
Alphabet images source: vintageprintable.swivelchairmedia.com (I love their rant about copyright and public money. Those images were plainly scanned from an out-of-copyright book, but that hasn’t stopped a famous stock photo site from claiming them as their own and wanting to charge you to use them. I strongly believe in paying artists for their work, but copyright doesn’t last forever, and re-scanning someone else’s work 70 or 80 years later doesn’t / shouldn’t give you artist rights.)
