When I was making my beefier jousting toad on a snapping turtle I seached again for jousting saddles from bygone eras.
I found a couple of recent posts by some people who take their re-creations of such things very seriously indeed! They'd be Arne Koets, Joram van Essen,
and Wouter Nicolai, among others.
Here's a
LINK to their explorations, experiments and findings.
Pretty fascinating stuff.
So I used their expertise to inform the sculpting of my new saddle.
Of course they had to make something to support a heavily armored real person to sit comfortably on and without hurting a real horse.
Here's an image from their post I was very happy to come by.
 |
| More on this at thejoustinglife.com (see link above) |
I, on the other hand, was making a saddle for an imaginary toad to sit on an imaginary turtle. Although I still wanted both my imaginary chums to be comfy.
 |
| Medieval jousting saddle typically used by turtle-riding toads |
 |
| Medieval war saddle used by toads in jousting tournaments when riding turtles |
Even though there's a blanket thing covering much of it, I stuck fairly closely to the old style saddle.
There's fudging and artistic license here and there of course, but I'm glad I found an authentic path to follow!
Here's the saddle in a turnaround video, although you'll probably need to hit the full screen icon and use the pause button if you want to get a good look at the leather tooling, studs, and what have you...!
Kickstarter update: Funding and pre-ordering for the
Silver Ghosts pendant collection is being made at a splendid clip (
it ends on June 26th)!
Thanks to backers and those who have 'liked', tweeted or in other ways helped spread the word, we're at 6 times the funding goal! I've snapped up a few tools and am tweaking away at the metal masters here and there, and re-doing some others so they'll be as good as I want them to be when finished in solid silver.
Thanks again backers and spreaders-of-the-word!
Click these links to visit my website...SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille
