3 Jan 2012

The Plantagenets - visual genealogy


King Richard III when he looked more alive
vs the Kings earthly remains in Leister UK
One of my very interesting, older clients,
Mr. Gaunt enjoys a pedigree of documented records and compiled by his great grandfather notary, some Mr. Langstaff, who from what I understand the meanders of it, Gaunts were distantly related, although himself not a descendant of the Gaunt lineage.
In brief, my client's lineage is so so long, it reaches beyond the times of Shakespeare. And, I dear say, to what I see - his English lineage is  perhaps more English that I wouldn't dare say whose...
Although.... I've heard a descendant of the English king Richard III, the last Plantagenet, now living in Canada (the relative, not the king, dummy)  is now being investigated by mitochondrial DNA testing.
Wow, that's so cool!


(f/National Post)
Memento Mori

formidable looking (f/Wikipedia)
For more fun - here is John of Gaunt to whom, my client, allegedly is/.may be connected. He is too looking formidably, also a Plantagenet.

For my clients project - The Gaunts of Midland I have printed very large sheets of detailed entries of the family lineage. The records were compiled years earlier by my clients father who being a printer himself took to setting type and produced several copies this enormously detailed poster.

My client's wish was to reproduce existing poster in multiple copies, make numerous corrections and amendments to his father's copy and to add a couple of lines of generations who came to life since the initial poster was printed.

The interesting details were the descriptive blurbs by persons (like the aforementioned Mr. Langstaff and Mr. Atwood) compiled and commented on the records.

Also, a wonderful navigational tool was included by the original printer - Mr. Gaunt's father - it was simple Chronology of English Kings placed on the left extended margin of the spreadsheet.
This enormously helped to locate in the reader's mind where given people were in the scope of larger history.
Although tempted, we did not include any illustrations - only few family crests, such as Gaunt or Mayott, so the body of the original layout will be preserved.
The amount of detailed records was massive so retyping for new layout formatting was out of the question - the room for error was too grave, many records look very similar with minute differences.
So I decided to scan the large sheet in sectors, combine those in photo editor, such as Photoshop and add new entries later.
Even combining the scans was a bit tricky - with age large sheets of paper shrink and expand unevenly, the lines connecting the levels of records were not very even when you seen closely.
Quite a bit of mending was necessary. Also, certain parts of the whole sheets were type set in a bit different times with slightly different font bits than the rest, differently inked and so on.
Working with exposure levels helped to even out the appearance of the type, the colour of the new entries made in QuarkXpress was set not as black but certain percentage of it.

The final sheets of the limited edition of the expanded and appended The Midland Gaunts was printed at about 30" x 40" on 180g archival Somerset Velvet, packed in wider radius shipping tubes and furnished with a pair of white gloves for viewing that would comply with good archival practice.








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