This is the second silver brooch I've calligraphed for an Aislinn. This time I don't know the gentle, but I was asked by a friend to do calligraphy on her first kingdom level scroll.
I got a picture of the exemplar, an early 16th century page. I had a hard time comparing it to my calligraphy books figuring out what hand it was, but eventually landed on batarde, with more than a couple different letters. I'm not upset at these letters as they're much easier for me to write.
I did the practice sheet and it came out much shorter than the allowed for space. Looking at the exemplar again, decided there was more space between each line than I had, so I re-wrote it with 2 lines of space. The new scribe was also the wordsmith and she had put the fully complete event name, which was quite long. "Brennan and Caoilfhionn's Ducal Challenges & Settmour Swamp Day of Champions". But shortening it down to simply "Ducal Challenge" made it fit just about perfectly. I know the King has a vertical signature and I wasn't certain if that allowed for enough room, but I also then looked at photos of a few scrolls that were just given out at Pennsic, and for some of them he split his signature into a 2x2 block of kanji instead of the 4 all vertical. So, either he'll split them again, or there will end up being enough room for it.
