paucinia hasn't been invited to a tournament for a long time (people tend to forget paucinia's there) so the council has to make some effort to discuss who'll represent them, even if the answer is obviously brigid

clockwise from far left: morton (wolf), beatrice (spaniel), agatha (afghan hound), ken (border collie), brigid (badger), phyllida (cat-skunk? i think?), four unnamed extras and benno (chihuahua)

brigid turning up to this meeting in chain mail isn't meant as a power move, she just wants to give them confidence she's ready and tooled up for the job

morton isn't disputing their choice so much as he's arguing that paucinia ought to decline on principle any invitations to tournaments because they're regressive glorifications of militarism. beatrice: well yeah, but it'll be fun, we ought to get out of the castle more often

agatha carries a torch for brigid and is heartstruck by her bravery (rightly, tournaments are dangerous). ken is mightily relieved that it's not him, but only because jousting etc is a huge faff and keeps you away from the beer tent

for phyllida it adds a fun new dimension to her ongoing flirtation with brigid. which is kind of irony-laden and mostly to tease others, since they both know brigid's chaste and unbothered and doesn't pick up those kind of signals anyway

and benno finally has something to tell in his dispatches home

(the extras, well - they're starved of gossip and this is all very exciting for them)

hello folks, good to be back making art again!

costumes plundered from the waterhouse and leighton wardrobes, plant cuttings taken from burne-jones and morris's gardens. i wanted to do a piece with lots of characters and the kind of flat quasi-perspective you see in some tapestries and murals. and i think there's some interesting kinship between furry self-indulgence and pre-raphaelite self-indulgence (or i just like them both)