I personally prefer version 02, but I think that's because I'm addicted to HW, and the map is now entirely ISO, rather than being a mix of top down and ISO.
Don't let that stop anyone from expressing an alternative opinion, though
Version 03 will, I think, redraw the standard symbols and take the map back to being entirely hand drawn. The mesa in both versions is already a hand drawn version of an HW mesa. Version 04, I envisage using Jim's symbols where I can, and Version 05... who knows!
Also, a few spelling errors - shold be 'whose', not 'who's' in the last line of the message; and it should be ghouls instead of gouls where the 'bogart sand gouls' are. Also, I would have preferred a more handwriting font with irregular edges, rather than so neatly aligned. But the map/letter overall is great
@Monsen - I'm hoping that version 03, where I draw the ISO hills instead of just pasting HW all over the place, will take it back to that natural feel
@qwalker - alas! My terrible spelling and atrocious grammar, usually concealed by various spellchecks and grammatical checks, is totally exposed in CC3, which I believe has neither! Thank you for catching me. I will make sure these things are put right in version 03 and from that point on
I really did try to find something that worked, in terms of font. I spent 2 hours just plodding through all the available handwriting and script fonts on dafont.com, and all I got was a very glazed expression. I did, however choose this 'Benegraphic' font, which I didn't realise has no en or em dashes!!!
I've just realise! LOL.... ROFL!!! I've spelled Boggarts wrong!!! So we have a lot of Humphrey Bogarts wandering around in the mist of the boglands!
ROFL!
There will be all these ghostly voices saying things like "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.", "Play it Sam. Play", and: "Here's looking at you, kid".
Sorry, Sue, its got to be version 1. I fear the old chap will indeed have starved to death before finishing version 2. He should have been a magic-user, then he could just have created the beautiful v 02 with a gesture or two, and without worrying about how long it would take to draw, perhaps...
Spelling mistakes - hmm, but WHOSE spelling mistakes? A desperate man constructing a note under less-than-ideal circumstances, after all. Plus Bogart won't even be an actor until 1921, so you could argue that bogarts and gouls are simply archaic spellings. Actually, until the points were raised, I thought they WERE (e.g. bogeyman and bogle are both folklorically connected to the boggart/bogart creature concept).
Well I've been thinking over the last couple of hours... (never a good sign)
If one of the five carrier pigeons survived the fall of the cage, why not 4 of them? And if 1 can be enticed into our man's little cave, why not all 4? He's the only one with any grain in these parts, after all.
Putting a whole page from a journal on the leg of a single pigeon was always a bit of a stretch of the possible, and he would have seen straight away that the chances of getting at least part of the map to his son would be greatly increased if he tore the page in four and sent it in four parts.
In fact only three of the pigeons are going to arrive, but as luck would have it only the sea leg of the journey is missing. (not that this is any comfort considering the kinds of hazards you can get in your average fantasy world ocean)
I know it sounds rather contrived, but at least I've allowed for one little disaster... apart from the main one, I mean
Just so I'm clear on this, Arramatapo is a heroic, grown, man, capable of making the treacherous journey to find his father and, possibly, slay a dragon, but he lives in his father's basement? What a mooch.
Ahem... There now follows a slight plot adjustment...
Arramatapo is indeed a full grown man of 16 ('full grown' as it was in the middle ages anyway, when 30 was old, 40 was ancient, and most of the lowlier folk were dead before they reached 50). He already has a wife and a household of his own - a life of his own, but the pigeons go home to his father's house where they were raised, and where his mother, Doranaya, and his younger brother, 13 year old Chetamak (Tam for short), still live.
Although the letters are addressed to Arramatapo, the elder son is away on business travelling by camel train to a distant port on the other side of the continent. There is no way to reach him, since carrier pigeon's only work one way - homeward bound.
And so despite Dorranaya's fears and concerns for her younger son, it is Tam who will set off on the voyage to rescue his father, and because he is only still a child, none of the men who might have accompanied Arramatapo are prepared go with him - not with a 13 year old boy as the expedition leader. Instead he manages to get a couple of his young friends to go with him, and together they 'borrow' one of his father's sailing ships to set off across the ocean in search of the mouth of the great river Orranar... the first part of the map having never arrived.
Well. Since I've bothered to name everyone else, I think I should probably name Arramatapo's father, but I can't do that right now because my neighbours have just started to cheer at some football game next door and I can't even think straight with them making such a racket!
And not being able to think any more until the game is over, I'll leave it to you to decide if this makes the story better, or worse.
At this point I feel a short story novella is in order, can you add that to your abundant free time Sue? Just kidding...about the free time that is not the story...LOL
ROFL! With this pandemonium going on just 6 feet away from me?
This is how novels are born. A very simple basic little tale gets gradually more and more convoluted, until there is just so much too it that you can't really write it as a short story any more
That's how my main story about the Children of Ethran was born. The problem I have with that one, however, is that its got so very big that it now requires five novels for me to be able to tell the full tale.
the kinds of hazards you can get in your average fantasy world ocean:
A friendly kraken that keeps tapping on your hull and asking "Do you want come out and play?" and sometimes snatches sailors from the deck so that they can come play with it.
The giant cetaceanesque creatures that are very concerned that your ship is sick because it's going so slowly and keep nudging it upwards a few (dozen) feet so that it can breathe better. The keel of your ship wasn't designed for this, by the way.
A giant turtle with an itchy spot on its nose who discovers that the barnacles on your hull make the perfect place to scratch that itch, leaving only smallish (five meter or so) cracks in the hull.
Flying swordfish. 'nuff said about that, I think.
And then there are the EVIL things that want to HURT you!
I got it right, Ed... unless I spoke too soon and this is going to turn into a point of conjecture! LOL
I got a headache trying to work out just how I would represent the hills of Nochay in a matter of seconds with the equipment to hand, humphed a sigh and scribbled a single fat line of wash like a midday shadow on all the slopes.
A wash type effect is surprisingly easy to achieve in CC3. I did this one by using a smooth line of my special lumpy wash fill that was 300 map units wide, with an Edge Fade Inner that was also 300 units wide. Made for some interesting interference effects where the line bent back on itself a bit too sharply, but they in themselves seemed to add to the effect rather than detract from it.
The special lumpy wash texture is like a solid colour but with the kind of variable transparency you would get with a low quality ink wash, or very diluted watercolour paint used on wet paper. The original resolution is too high for me to upload here, but here is a 1000x1000 pi version of it if you want to have a go
Not sure about this "sent in four parts" element though. How long is the youngster going to wait for Part the Fourth NOT to arrive before setting out?
So maybe reducing the entire map to fit just this one strip of paper might be better. According to Wikipedia (Homing pigeon page) a trained pigeon can carry up to 75 g = 2½ oz attached to its back. The archetypal rolled strip of thin paper attached to such a bird's leg in a little metal tube would of course need to be still smaller.
I think your average sheet of copier paper is about 60-70 gsm, so technically speaking (if it was possible to fold it small enough) a carrier pigeon could carry a single sheet as large as about 30cm square. So even if you allow for the fact that hand made paper in a personal journal would probably be more like the weight of very thin card (about 100 gsm), we could still assume that an A5 sheet would be ok - again, IF you could fold it small enough to fit in whatever tiny rucksack arrangement the pigeon could be persuaded to wear.
However... having started down the road of 4 separate pigeons, I'm going to rely on the impatience of youth to drive 13 year old Chetamak (Tam) to set off with a misguided belief that he can traverse the ocean without too much trouble, and doesn't need to wait for the missing map of the ocean voyage.
When I've finished the three separate maps, I might join them all together in one long strip to create a version carried by a single sturdy and well trained pigeon... though if that one pigeon is lost, then all is lost anyway.
This was the question I had already asked myself. Given the choice between splitting the map between the four pigeons I have, or sending it with just the one, what would I do?
My reasoning was this - that if I just happened to choose the pigeon destined to never make it home again, the whole exercise would be a waste of time, If I wanted to be more or less certain that at least one small part of my message would get through to alert my family that something was wrong, I would send it in four parts, and hope that at least two made it home, while knowing that my folks would have a rough idea of the fact that the lair of the infamous Sheleeva was "somewhere over yon" with a vague wave across the sea in more or less the right direction.
I'll do both versions and present them side by side
Personally, I would make two or three identical maps, and send a complete map on each pigeon. Preferably reduce the size if I knew a pigeon couldn't carry the entire sheet.
Well there is that option, of course, but then we get back into the old argument of just how much time has our man got while trying to keep the interest of 4 hungry carrier pigeons on just a single pocket full of grain.
They can eat a huge amount in a very short time, which is why in some countries they are shot as vermin like rats or mice
I will see how tiny I can make the details for the all-in-one version ribbon map.
I'm thinking a rolled up and squashed flat ribbon map (ie one that he's rolled and stood on with his great big explorer's boot to ensure it stays rolled) would be easier to get into a pigeon's rucksack than a heavily folded rectangular one.)
Not sure about the "wisdom"; curiosity killed the cat, after all...
However, providing the homing pigeons have been trained to carry messages, quite a variety of gear seems to have been attached to them over the years, besides the little metal leg tubes, and that does indeed include something resembling a small, flat rucksack. Most photos online seem to be from the two 20th century World Wars, including small cameras attached to their chests (search using "carrier pigeon Cher Ami" if interested), but these back tubes seemed popular in late WW2 as another option:
I first found a version of that image on this BBC News webpage (it's about two-thirds of the way down the page; also explains the "Cher Ami" in my suggested search phrase, incidentally).
There's also a Daily Mail story from 2009 about pigeons being used to carry imaging flash cards in the Rocky Mountains using tiny rucksacks.
And back to topic...
Weight as you say is perhaps less of a problem in this case; the key thing seems to be to fold the item small enough, which usually means thin paper or cloth (silk is the obvious choice for the latter, as it compresses so well). Maybe add a second line of fold creases down the long axis of the maps, as if they'd been folded into thirds, not just in two, perhaps?
Liking the tripartite strip maps very much, but I'm inclined to agree with Monsen that multiple copies of identical complete maps sent with all the available pigeons would be my first choice too. There are a lot of predators out there keen for some tasty fresh pigeon meat, plus the birds must fly across a sea area, which is always a risk for air-breathing creatures, especially small ones, as you can never guarantee good weather all the way across, and there's nowhere safe to shelter from it. Plus you've already assumed a 25% failure rate in arrivals anyway!
Shading on Maps 3 & 4 again maybe a little too elaborate, and also the compass roses (simple arrow showing north, possibly with a short east-west crossbar, instead, say)?
Posted By: Wyvern...quite a variety of gear seems to have been attached to them over the years, besides the little metal leg tubes, and that does indeed include something resembling a small, flat rucksack...
Perfect! I had some kind of race memory (or I'd seen this in old b/w films when a child some 40 years ago). I already had this kind of arrangement in mind
Posted By: Wyvern...Weight as you say is perhaps less of a problem in the case; the key thing seems to be to fold the item small enough, which usually means thin paper or cloth (silk is the obvious choice for the latter, as it compresses so well). Maybe add a second line of fold creases down the long axis of the maps, as if they'd been folded into thirds, not just in two, perhaps?
Silk... now that's in interesting idea. I have the facility to make a folded silk texture... but what is our man likely to have in the way of silk on his person?
Looking at the size of the rucksack compared to the size of the handler's hands, I'd say that as long as you could manage to fold the paper to about the size of your index finger, but a bit flatter, that should fit. That's about the size of the existing strips when folded in two. The scale clue lies in the size of the mug stain. This wasn't a very big journal, and these maps are actually quite small.
Posted By: WyvernLiking the tripartite strip maps very much, but I'm inclined to agree with Monsen that multiple copies of identical complete maps sent with all the available pigeons would be my first choice too. There are a lot of predators out there keen for some tasty fresh pigeon meat, plus the birds must fly across a sea area, which is always a risk for air-breathing creatures, especially small ones, as you can never guarantee good weather all the way across, and there's nowhere safe to shelter from it. Plus you've already assumed a 25% failure rate in arrivals anyway!
Shading on Maps 3 & 4 again maybe a little too elaborate, and also the compass roses (simple arrow showing north, possibly with a short east-west crossbar, instead, say)?
I'm going to do the long ribbon map - promise! I just need to get my head together enough to turn the entire first map the other way up (with the obvious difficulty that its not just a case of rotating every thing 180 degrees, or the boats would be upside down!!!! LOL).
I keep getting this shading 'elaborate', but I think the problem here is that I would find it very easy to do this kind of ink shading in a matter of seconds because I spent 4 years practicing it at art school, and ink on paper dries very quickly, allowing several layers to be used and a relatively complex picture constructed in about 30 minutes. I'm not sure what I can do to cure myself of the assumption that my man would be able to do the same thing.
Posted By: Wyvern...I miss the bogarts and gouls
LOL! My spelling can be pretty hilarious at times, but now its been spotted I can't bring myself to make them deliberately wrong again!
Posted By: Loopysue...but what is our man likely to have in the way of silk on his person?
Handkerchief? Cravat? Is it possible he might have been mapping onto silk, rather than paper? I've little experience using silk as an artist's material, so I'm not sure how practical or robust this might be for field-use, however.
Posted By: WyvernHandkerchief? Cravat? Is it possible he might have been mapping onto silk, rather than paper? I've little experience using silk as an artist's material, so I'm not sure how practical or robust this might be for field-use, however.
I guess he would have some silk on him, but I've just realised something else that should have occurred to me the moment silk was mentioned.
Unless it is treated with some kind of seize, pronounced 'size' (a sort of varnish that primes cloth ready for painting - as in "seized canvas"), using it would be out of the question because the ink would bleed so badly through the fibres everything would be a blur - a bit like if an ink pen leaked in the breast pocket of a school shirt.
In Michelangelo's day canvas was seized with fish glue or gum Arabic mixed with honey and egg white.
Nowadays its all plastic polymers. I seize my own canvases with white acrylic paint. Ordinary matte white emulsion of the kind you paint on a wall will do the trick at a push (like if you suddenly get the urge to paint but discover you left the lid off your acrylic the last time you used it!).
The problem we have with our man's little retreat is that he hasn't got anything that can be used as a seize. Even if he had a couple of fish in his bag, he's nothing to boil up their bones, and it would take up a whole lot more than just a couple of fish to make enough fish glue/varnish to seize even just a pocket handkerchief.
Hmmn
I think we will have to stick with paper - having already decided that parchment was also out of the question because of the folding problem.
Comments
I personally prefer version 02, but I think that's because I'm addicted to HW, and the map is now entirely ISO, rather than being a mix of top down and ISO.
Don't let that stop anyone from expressing an alternative opinion, though
Version 03 will, I think, redraw the standard symbols and take the map back to being entirely hand drawn. The mesa in both versions is already a hand drawn version of an HW mesa. Version 04, I envisage using Jim's symbols where I can, and Version 05... who knows!
@qwalker - alas! My terrible spelling and atrocious grammar, usually concealed by various spellchecks and grammatical checks, is totally exposed in CC3, which I believe has neither! Thank you for catching me. I will make sure these things are put right in version 03 and from that point on
I really did try to find something that worked, in terms of font. I spent 2 hours just plodding through all the available handwriting and script fonts on dafont.com, and all I got was a very glazed expression. I did, however choose this 'Benegraphic' font, which I didn't realise has no en or em dashes!!!
I don't seem to have very much luck with fonts.
However, if you have a better one in mind... ?
ROFL!
There will be all these ghostly voices saying things like "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.", "Play it Sam. Play", and: "Here's looking at you, kid".
Sorry. I promise I'll be sensible now...
Spelling mistakes - hmm, but WHOSE spelling mistakes? A desperate man constructing a note under less-than-ideal circumstances, after all. Plus Bogart won't even be an actor until 1921, so you could argue that bogarts and gouls are simply archaic spellings. Actually, until the points were raised, I thought they WERE (e.g. bogeyman and bogle are both folklorically connected to the boggart/bogart creature concept).
Fonts - always problematical. You are not alone!
If one of the five carrier pigeons survived the fall of the cage, why not 4 of them? And if 1 can be enticed into our man's little cave, why not all 4? He's the only one with any grain in these parts, after all.
Putting a whole page from a journal on the leg of a single pigeon was always a bit of a stretch of the possible, and he would have seen straight away that the chances of getting at least part of the map to his son would be greatly increased if he tore the page in four and sent it in four parts.
I think you've seen where I'm going with this...
I know it sounds rather contrived, but at least I've allowed for one little disaster... apart from the main one, I mean
Arramatapo is indeed a full grown man of 16 ('full grown' as it was in the middle ages anyway, when 30 was old, 40 was ancient, and most of the lowlier folk were dead before they reached 50). He already has a wife and a household of his own - a life of his own, but the pigeons go home to his father's house where they were raised, and where his mother, Doranaya, and his younger brother, 13 year old Chetamak (Tam for short), still live.
Although the letters are addressed to Arramatapo, the elder son is away on business travelling by camel train to a distant port on the other side of the continent. There is no way to reach him, since carrier pigeon's only work one way - homeward bound.
And so despite Dorranaya's fears and concerns for her younger son, it is Tam who will set off on the voyage to rescue his father, and because he is only still a child, none of the men who might have accompanied Arramatapo are prepared go with him - not with a 13 year old boy as the expedition leader. Instead he manages to get a couple of his young friends to go with him, and together they 'borrow' one of his father's sailing ships to set off across the ocean in search of the mouth of the great river Orranar... the first part of the map having never arrived.
Well. Since I've bothered to name everyone else, I think I should probably name Arramatapo's father, but I can't do that right now because my neighbours have just started to cheer at some football game next door and I can't even think straight with them making such a racket!
And not being able to think any more until the game is over, I'll leave it to you to decide if this makes the story better, or worse.
Bill
This is how novels are born. A very simple basic little tale gets gradually more and more convoluted, until there is just so much too it that you can't really write it as a short story any more
That's how my main story about the Children of Ethran was born. The problem I have with that one, however, is that its got so very big that it now requires five novels for me to be able to tell the full tale.
A friendly kraken that keeps tapping on your hull and asking "Do you want come out and play?" and sometimes snatches sailors from the deck so that they can come play with it.
The giant cetaceanesque creatures that are very concerned that your ship is sick because it's going so slowly and keep nudging it upwards a few (dozen) feet so that it can breathe better. The keel of your ship wasn't designed for this, by the way.
A giant turtle with an itchy spot on its nose who discovers that the barnacles on your hull make the perfect place to scratch that itch, leaving only smallish (five meter or so) cracks in the hull.
Flying swordfish. 'nuff said about that, I think.
And then there are the EVIL things that want to HURT you!
Stop it! What with them next door, and you making me giggle, how am I supposed to draw anything!!!
EDIT: Though I do see that you have just added a few more rather wonderful quirks to the tale.
Thank you Joe
Up-side...?
I finished the first third of the map
LLAP
Nacon4
I got it right, Ed... unless I spoke too soon and this is going to turn into a point of conjecture! LOL
I got a headache trying to work out just how I would represent the hills of Nochay in a matter of seconds with the equipment to hand, humphed a sigh and scribbled a single fat line of wash like a midday shadow on all the slopes.
A wash type effect is surprisingly easy to achieve in CC3. I did this one by using a smooth line of my special lumpy wash fill that was 300 map units wide, with an Edge Fade Inner that was also 300 units wide. Made for some interesting interference effects where the line bent back on itself a bit too sharply, but they in themselves seemed to add to the effect rather than detract from it.
The special lumpy wash texture is like a solid colour but with the kind of variable transparency you would get with a low quality ink wash, or very diluted watercolour paint used on wet paper. The original resolution is too high for me to upload here, but here is a 1000x1000 pi version of it if you want to have a go
LLAP
Nacon4
Not sure about this "sent in four parts" element though. How long is the youngster going to wait for Part the Fourth NOT to arrive before setting out?
So maybe reducing the entire map to fit just this one strip of paper might be better. According to Wikipedia (Homing pigeon page) a trained pigeon can carry up to 75 g = 2½ oz attached to its back. The archetypal rolled strip of thin paper attached to such a bird's leg in a little metal tube would of course need to be still smaller.
As always you are a font of wisdom.
I think your average sheet of copier paper is about 60-70 gsm, so technically speaking (if it was possible to fold it small enough) a carrier pigeon could carry a single sheet as large as about 30cm square. So even if you allow for the fact that hand made paper in a personal journal would probably be more like the weight of very thin card (about 100 gsm), we could still assume that an A5 sheet would be ok - again, IF you could fold it small enough to fit in whatever tiny rucksack arrangement the pigeon could be persuaded to wear.
However... having started down the road of 4 separate pigeons, I'm going to rely on the impatience of youth to drive 13 year old Chetamak (Tam) to set off with a misguided belief that he can traverse the ocean without too much trouble, and doesn't need to wait for the missing map of the ocean voyage.
When I've finished the three separate maps, I might join them all together in one long strip to create a version carried by a single sturdy and well trained pigeon... though if that one pigeon is lost, then all is lost anyway.
This was the question I had already asked myself. Given the choice between splitting the map between the four pigeons I have, or sending it with just the one, what would I do?
My reasoning was this - that if I just happened to choose the pigeon destined to never make it home again, the whole exercise would be a waste of time, If I wanted to be more or less certain that at least one small part of my message would get through to alert my family that something was wrong, I would send it in four parts, and hope that at least two made it home, while knowing that my folks would have a rough idea of the fact that the lair of the infamous Sheleeva was "somewhere over yon" with a vague wave across the sea in more or less the right direction.
I'll do both versions and present them side by side
They can eat a huge amount in a very short time, which is why in some countries they are shot as vermin like rats or mice
I will see how tiny I can make the details for the all-in-one version ribbon map.
I'm thinking a rolled up and squashed flat ribbon map (ie one that he's rolled and stood on with his great big explorer's boot to ensure it stays rolled) would be easier to get into a pigeon's rucksack than a heavily folded rectangular one.)
Because of it's width the resolution here is very tiny, so I strongly recommend visiting the Finished Map thread over at the Guild
This is the bigger version
All the works in process from this point on will be of the ribbon map.
However, providing the homing pigeons have been trained to carry messages, quite a variety of gear seems to have been attached to them over the years, besides the little metal leg tubes, and that does indeed include something resembling a small, flat rucksack. Most photos online seem to be from the two 20th century World Wars, including small cameras attached to their chests (search using "carrier pigeon Cher Ami" if interested), but these back tubes seemed popular in late WW2 as another option:
I first found a version of that image on this BBC News webpage (it's about two-thirds of the way down the page; also explains the "Cher Ami" in my suggested search phrase, incidentally).
There's also a Daily Mail story from 2009 about pigeons being used to carry imaging flash cards in the Rocky Mountains using tiny rucksacks.
And back to topic...
Weight as you say is perhaps less of a problem in this case; the key thing seems to be to fold the item small enough, which usually means thin paper or cloth (silk is the obvious choice for the latter, as it compresses so well). Maybe add a second line of fold creases down the long axis of the maps, as if they'd been folded into thirds, not just in two, perhaps?
Liking the tripartite strip maps very much, but I'm inclined to agree with Monsen that multiple copies of identical complete maps sent with all the available pigeons would be my first choice too. There are a lot of predators out there keen for some tasty fresh pigeon meat, plus the birds must fly across a sea area, which is always a risk for air-breathing creatures, especially small ones, as you can never guarantee good weather all the way across, and there's nowhere safe to shelter from it. Plus you've already assumed a 25% failure rate in arrivals anyway!
Shading on Maps 3 & 4 again maybe a little too elaborate, and also the compass roses (simple arrow showing north, possibly with a short east-west crossbar, instead, say)?
I miss the bogarts and gouls
Looking at the size of the rucksack compared to the size of the handler's hands, I'd say that as long as you could manage to fold the paper to about the size of your index finger, but a bit flatter, that should fit. That's about the size of the existing strips when folded in two. The scale clue lies in the size of the mug stain. This wasn't a very big journal, and these maps are actually quite small. I'm going to do the long ribbon map - promise! I just need to get my head together enough to turn the entire first map the other way up (with the obvious difficulty that its not just a case of rotating every thing 180 degrees, or the boats would be upside down!!!! LOL).
I keep getting this shading 'elaborate', but I think the problem here is that I would find it very easy to do this kind of ink shading in a matter of seconds because I spent 4 years practicing it at art school, and ink on paper dries very quickly, allowing several layers to be used and a relatively complex picture constructed in about 30 minutes. I'm not sure what I can do to cure myself of the assumption that my man would be able to do the same thing. LOL! My spelling can be pretty hilarious at times, but now its been spotted I can't bring myself to make them deliberately wrong again!
Thanks again Wyvern for your sterling support
Unless it is treated with some kind of seize, pronounced 'size' (a sort of varnish that primes cloth ready for painting - as in "seized canvas"), using it would be out of the question because the ink would bleed so badly through the fibres everything would be a blur - a bit like if an ink pen leaked in the breast pocket of a school shirt.
In Michelangelo's day canvas was seized with fish glue or gum Arabic mixed with honey and egg white.
Nowadays its all plastic polymers. I seize my own canvases with white acrylic paint. Ordinary matte white emulsion of the kind you paint on a wall will do the trick at a push (like if you suddenly get the urge to paint but discover you left the lid off your acrylic the last time you used it!).
The problem we have with our man's little retreat is that he hasn't got anything that can be used as a seize. Even if he had a couple of fish in his bag, he's nothing to boil up their bones, and it would take up a whole lot more than just a couple of fish to make enough fish glue/varnish to seize even just a pocket handkerchief.
Hmmn
I think we will have to stick with paper - having already decided that parchment was also out of the question because of the folding problem.