Identity V Night Watch Skin

[Marylouise Colleen]

Forthe paper, I used Express-it A4 blending card, specially suited to accomodate the blending properties of the alcohol-based ink of Copics. The paper stays perfectly flat even when saturated with layer after layer of juicy alcohol based ink (no warping or curling, yay!).

Discovering little details in The Night Watch was lots of fun. I got to know all the little faces, and I loved studying what each person was doing. I was able to look in super close detail about weapons and fancy hats, and picked up some cool hidden secrets not immediately obvious to the observer.

One of the characters is firing his musket into the background. If you look at the left side of the hat of van Ruytenburch in the beige outfit, a plume of fire and smoke is seen. Behind, the man with the floppy brown hat, recoils in shock (see the picture of Cocq, above).

The original title was not The Night Watch. In 1642, when Rembrandt finished the painting, it had no title, but was soon being called Civic Guardsmen of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. By 1797, the varnish which covered the painting had significantly darkened, leading people to start calling it The Night Watch. The nickname stuck, but the Rijksmuseum still calls it by its first name.

In 1715, the painting was relocated from its original home in the Great Hall of Amsterdam (Kloveniersdoelen), where the arquebusiers would meet, to the new location at the Amsterdam Town Hall. It would not fit on the proposed wall, so all four sides of the painting were sliced off to trim it down, completely removing two figures on the left and moving the central figures from off-right to the centre of the picture, changing the original asymmetrical aspect.

In 1911, it suffered its first vandal attack, when an unemployed shoemaker attempted to slash the canvas with a knife, but was unable to damage it. When World War 2 broke out in September 1939, the painting was removed from its stretcher bars and rolled up around a special roller. It was kept in a safe in Maastrict for the duration of the war.

1975 saw the painting slashed again, this time by another unemployed man, who put 12 huge slashes into it that took four years to restore. In 1990, another vandalism attempt occurred with an acid spray attack, but only the varnish was affected. Finally, 2019 was the beginning of a large restoration effort, Operation Nightwatch, to further study and restore the masterpiece.

I completed my Copic sketch of the Night Watch using 16 marker colours, and it took about one week. I used a lot of browns, warm greys and cool greys that made up most of the picture, as well as (gasp!) the forbidden shade black to fill in some of the shadow areas.

I used highlights of yellow, red and a small amount of blue in many of the outfits, and to create reflections off the metal areas. For faces, I only had four skin tone markers, so the ability of introduce some skin tone variation was much reduced.

One really cool effect that I noticed was the bleed-through of the ink onto the other side of the page. Anticipating this, I used a backing paper to prevent my other Xpress-it blending card pages from being ruined. The result of all that bleed-through is a really satisfying blotted and mirrored copy of the piece, which feels like a photo negative where the white lines replace the black fineliner.

The end result of my Copic marker Rembrandt challenge looks wonderful, and a complete success! I have some elements I would change for future pieces, most notably choosing a larger range of colours (particularly skin tones), as well as choosing a piece with more flat open spaces to try and maximise the blending potential of Copics.

Thomas was named for the muskrat, wazhashk, the lowly, hardworking, water loving rodent. Muskrats were everywhere on the slough-dotted reservation. Their small supple forms slipped busily through water at dusk, continually perfecting their burrows, and eating (how they loved to eat). Although the wazhashkag were numerous and ordinary, they were also crucial ... In the beginning, after the great flood, it was a muskrat who had helped remake the earth. In that way, as it turned out, Thomas was perfectly named.

I reread his letters every so often to get a grip on why I'm doing this writing. I mean, he was a wonderful writer. His letters are beautiful, full of humor and storytelling. And he wrote them during this time when he was fighting termination and working as the night watchman. And what I think I absorbed was his sense of decency, and his commitment to his family and his people. It's hard to write about a decent person, you know. It is. It is hard. When I write characters. My instinct is really to give them a flaw, a conflict, something huge that they they're struggling against.

She's the kind of woman who did things perfectly when enraged. And she follows her sister because her sister has become part of this other program that it hinged into termination. And that was called relocation. And relocation was designed to remove native people from the reservations by giving them incentives to move to the city. So instead of putting that money into infrastructure on reservations, the government decided to move people off that valuable property.

As it shook out, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was the one tribe to resist early and early on. Of those first five, what happened was complete devastation and loss. The forests were sold off. The tribes ended up with, again, you know, through the generations, a smaller and smaller land base, and now finally it was loss of identity. It was loss of life. There was despair among people who were terminated. They had done everything possible to fit in to American society and culture. But it wasn't enough.

This is something that I worried about. It wasn't why I wrote the book, but maybe it was why my grandfather's letters were so powerfully resonant for me, because I'd been thinking about this for years and years. And why I had to write it then was, it just took over. I had another book I was working on, and this suddenly became vital to me and his voice, Patrice's voice, everything in it. It flowed so rapidly and I had to write it.

Notice that Jon does not immediately recognize Rattleshirt because his bones are gone. His name is also not used in the initial paragraph when he enters the room but George still includes descriptive language to compare him to a snake. His face is mottled, which maybe another hint to his upcoming death but it along with the loss of most of his front teeth makes one think of a snake as well.

The horn crashed amongst the logs and leaves and kindling. Within three heartbeats the whole pit was aflame. Clutching the bars of his cage with bound hands, Mance sobbed and begged. When the fire reached him he did a little dance. His screams became one long, wordless shriek of fear and pain. Within his cage, he fluttered like a burning leaf, a moth caught in a candle flame.

The King-beyond-the-Wall looked nothing like a king, nor even much a wildling. He was of middling height, slender, sharp-faced, with shrewd brown eyes and long brown hair that had gone mostly to grey. There was no crown on his head, no gold rings on his arms, no jewels at his throat, not even a gleam of silver. He wore wool and leather, and his only garment of note was his ragged black wool cloak, its long tears patched with faded red silk.

"Rhaegar met Robert on the Trident, and you know what happened there. When the word reached court, Aerys packed the queen off to Dragonstone with Prince Viserys. Princess Elia would have gone as well, but he forbade it. Somehow he had gotten it in his head that Prince Lewyn must have betrayed Rhaegar on the Trident, but he thought he could keep Dorne loyal so long as he kept Elia and Aegon by his side.

What did Jon Arryn say to convinced Doran to put an end to Oberyn raising the banners in support of Viserys? Did Jon have knowledge that the bones were not Lewyn and that he was in fact still alive? Possibly!

Petyr tells Sansa that Lyn Corbray picked up Lady Forlorn, his familial Valyrian steel sword from the battlefield and slew the man who had so seriously wounded his father. This man was said to be Prince Lewyn Martell. The tale seems overly heroic and as he is wont to do, George undercuts the heroism by letting the reader know that Lewyn was already seriously injured when Lyn killed him.

This was an ancient battle from during the period when the First Men war with the Andals for supremacy over Westeros. George tells us that on that ancient day, Lady Forlorn also fell on the field of battle and was picked up by a Corbray.

The giant died choking on his last laugh, the singers say. Whereupon the High King spied the Falcon Knight across the field and spurred toward him; should their leader fall, the Andals would lose heart and break, he hoped.

A few tents were still standing on the far side of the camp, and it was there they found Mance Rayder. Beneath his slashed cloak of black wool and red silk he wore black ringmail and shaggy fur breeches, and on his head was a great bronze-and-iron helm with raven wings at either temple. Jarl was with him, and Harma the Dogshead; Styr as well, and Varamyr Sixskins with his wolves and his shadowcat.

King Robar came into possession of Lady Forlorn in war and lost it the same way when it fell from his hand on the field of battle, was picked up by a Corbray, and then possibly used as the weapon that provided the final death stroke that ended his life. With the similarities between the two battles including the presence of the Knights of the Vale; and the original bearer of Lady Forlorn from House Corbray falling in battle and losing his sword only to have the blade picked up by another family member, might George not be hinting that a similar case of mistaken identity occurred at both the Battle of Seven Stars and the Battle of the Trident?

The interesting thing about the Battle of Seven Stars is that it and the story of Ser Artys Arryn battling Robar Royce was not part of the original legend of the Winged Knight of the Vale. George re-wrote his original description of the Winged Knight to include Artys Arryn and the battle for the 2014 publication of TWOIAF. And I find it extremely curious that he updated it to echo a tale told about the modern day Battle of the Trident that first appeared in AFFC, which was published in 2005. Why the update and similarity one must ask?

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