Although my website has proven to be very useful to many Amtgarders, it still provides me with some amount of dismay that it seems it is perhaps "too" popular. Everyone seems to ask me for awards. I still feel, however, that awards should be, at the core, something that is not simply handed out, but a meaningful piece, that needs to be hand drawn and created specifically for the person it is awarded to, not some thing created on the computer and mass produced. This applies mostly, in my mind, for the higher level awards. Awards, in particular titles, high level awards, and knight's scrolls, I feel should be drawn by hand, to prove that that person who achieved such an award deserves to have a finished artwork as something that can be beautiful unto itself, and not some sheet of paper in some brag book somewhere.

I was asked, in the summer of 2007, to create two awards for a friend of mine, who received her ninth and tenth rose. Along with these I was also asked to create two other titles and a Dreamkeeper along with it. These are those awards.

 

Ninth and Tenth Roses

I truly suck at doing hand written text on awards. For some reason I can put all the time in the world into creating pretty pictures for the awards, but I can't seem to get the hang of working more than a few minutes on the text. Which is why I should of had other people who are more adept at text do it. But I did not.

The Dreamkeeper award was meant to be really secondary to the primary award part that was given out with it, which was a large dream catcher designed and created by Callandra.

Here you can see to progression on the awards, as I scanned them at various stages of completion. First, I penciled in every line (this is something that I did not want to mess up in the final stages), using a ruler. Then, I took a fine tip calligraphy pen and traced all the lines. Last, I took watercolor pencil and colored in slightly at the edges, for the most part, and took a fine paintbrush and drew a bit of water over them, forcing the watercolor towards the center of the images, giving it a gradient without bogging down the paper with color. I used very little water, this wasn't even watercolor paper, but some random sketch pad, (actually, the images are pretty small, smaller than a piece of standard computer paper) that I found in my apartment. The final touch was made with either gold or silver acrylic paint used as ink in calligraphic writing. I did not use gold in the rose awards, but silver, for accent, because the recipient of the awards detests the color gold.