Banners for the Mediaeval Play, "Ye Good Old Bard"

For my medieval project, I decided to work with a few other people to create a medieval drama/play. Since I do not have experience in acting, I worked behind the scenes and created some of the set designs for the performance. Our play has many different scenes, with each scene taking place in a different location, so I took the role of painting the backgrounds for two of the outdoor scenes: the bridge scene and the forest scene. Along with this, I also created a medieval-style banner that has the title of our play, “Ye Goode Olde Bard,” written on it. At first, I struggled to decide which medium I was going to use to create these scenes, but ultimately, I chose to paint them since paintings were one of the more common art forms used during the Middle Ages. Since the forest scene is the scene where our squire meets the fairy, I wanted to create a sense of fantasy in the painting as fairies are very mystical creatures. To do this, I painted little bright dots on the trees and over the bushes to create a sort of glimmer that one expects to come with a fairy. As for the bridge scene, it involved the troll, so I wanted to make the painting look a bit gloomier to go with the typical stereotype of trolls as foul creatures. To achieve this, I used colours that were less bright to bring the sense of melancholy to the viewers’ eyes. Finally, for the title banner, I drew inspiration from the tavern signs that were used during the Middle Ages as I thought it would be fitting for our play. Since plays during this time would typically be performed in a tavern setting, I thought it would be appropriate to create a sign that was reminiscent of this design.

Ujala Yousuf