Scroll creation is like cooking. You begin the creative process knowing for whom you want to cook and when you want to serve it. You collect the essential ingredients you want to use, calligraphy, paint, and support. Using medieval sources, you add a pinch of intuition, a dash of inspiration, stir them together hoping for a tasty result. The best scroll art harmonizes flavors to create an effective dish, sometimes with spices of surprise or humor.

The backbone ingredient of cooking an SCA scroll is the layout. A thorough layout plan saves preparing the dish by ruling, and lettering, only to realize you have insufficient space for illumination and standard framing. With a thorough layout, you know the space the text and illumination will occupy and even plan wiggle-room. You may also change ingredients to enhance the scroll’s visual impact.

Layout of a simple scroll

A simple page layout, like the one to the right, is a basic recipe for lettering a couple of lines, a current certificate or calligraphy art. But scrolls are different than modern certificates. They use layout and design differently than today’s graphic art. An SCA scroll’s purpose is to emulate a medieval manuscript or legal page. Many graphic art “rules” don’t apply. Scroll layout is based on page design found in medieval manuscripts.  

What’s an Award Scroll’s Purpose?