Medieval art

The Spoonflower contest theme for the week is Medieval.  This conjures up images of pseudo-Celtic motifs and Robin Hood.  At first I wasn't interested, but I started looking for things that might appeal to me.  At first I looked for images of medieval jewelry, but found very little of interest.  The metal working skills of the time appear to be pretty limited.  Then I ran across examples of illuminated texts.  I have always thought these were interesting and beautiful.  I have seen examples in museums and the New York Public Library.  Most of the online images I found were Celtic or Western European.  While beautiful, they weren't what I was looking for.  Then I found these images at the Getty Museum site, from the Canon Tables from the Zeyt'un Gospels. They are Armenian from the year 1295.

The images are wonderful.  I started to work on a lovely double border print with blue and gold scroll work and stylized leaves and vines as well as several different birds in blue and red on a parchment background.  I spent quite a bit of time learning how to manage gradients in Illustrator to do some shading.  That was interesting and useful.  Unfortunately I lost most of the work I had done, the joys of working digitally, and I'm not interested in starting over.  I've had my fun imagining the design.  I have other things I need to do.  Trust me, it was going to be really good.