How do I make my family trees, part three (the end)
And we've reached to a conclusion! Here is the final part of my tutorial.
Part 1 and Part 2.
9. Draw the lines
Go to the "draw" option and select the tools I circled in red. I made the lines black, and size 4 (although I ended up changing it to 8 later).
IMPORTANT: Layers
In order to draw you must select a layer on the right side bar; there is an empty layer at the bottom that works for that. My advice is that you create a new layer for every line you'll draw, because that way is easier to delete any mistake you make or move around the lines if you need to. And make sure the layer you are drawing on is under the pictures, otherwise the lines will end up on top.
I always start drawing the lines that connect spouses. In order to do that zoom in as much as you can and trace a horizontal line.
Now that I've drawn all the spouses lines, I move on to the parents lines. For this first I draw a vertical line that comes from the middle of the spouses line, and then a vertical line that goes up from the "head" of the picture of the child/ren (see example below). It doesn't matter if the lines are too long, will erase that later.
And now I draw an horizontal line that connects the vertical lines:
Now we have to erase the excess of the lines. There is an eraser tool but we won't be using that. What we will use is the rectangular shape of the side bar; simply make a white rectangle on top of the line excess in order to erase it.
And this is basically the secret (?) of how do I make the lines.
Now what if you don't have the time to do your tree in one sitting, or simply get tired and want to finish it later? I doesn't matter at which stage you are, go to "save" and save your project as a PXZ file. Next time you open the file in Pixlr you'll find your project exactly as you left it.
But I am done so I save my proyect as a JPG. Here is the final result! I added the years of the marriages and signed it.
I hope you found this tutorial helpful! If not, at least I got to share the "behind the scenes" of the making of my trees. If you have any doubts tell me!
Here it is the second of my attempt at a tutorial. Also because I miscalculated how many screenshots I was going to use this tutorial is a trilogy now! Part three will be out tomorrow (and this time I won't delay it, it's almos done).
Part 1 of the tutorial can be found here.
5. Create a blank canvas
Open Pixlr and click "Create new". This will be the canvas for your tree. So I chose the "1080x1900" resolution, which ended up being the wrong size lol, but I make it work so bear with me.
Make sure the "background" option is on. I make it white because I think it highlights the pictures and lines better, but of course you can choose whatever color you want.
Now we can start working on our canvas.
6. Load all your pictures
Easy step: go to "add element/image" and then select "add media". Load all the pictures you turned into pngs in the first part of the tutorial.
As you can notices, the images are different sizes: that is because the pictures I worked with all had different resolutions. What I do to make them all the same is this: I grab any of the pictures and put it on top of the one that has the size I want all the pictures to be. In this case, the size of the picture of Duke Max.
Once the picture is on top of the other I drag the borders until it is the same size of the picture under. It is a bit hard to explain without showing you but I hope you understand what I mean.
Now all the pictures have the same size! Onto the next step.
7. Order your pictures
This is the part where I wish I could record my screen. Basically when you start moving the pictures you'll see that lines will appear on the canvas. Those line are guides that will show you if your pictures are aligned. For example, the lines on top of Ludovika's picture means that it is (almost) perfectly aligned with the picture of Queen Caroline and her sister Amalie.
The guides will appear on their own and won't show up in the final tree: they are just guides.
INTERMISSION: So you messed up the canvas size
At this point I realized that the size of my canvas was clearly wrong. But no need to panic! It can be fixed. Just go to "layout and template" and select "set page size"
Once in there I just changed the width from "1080" to "1980". Problem fixed! Now I can continue ordering the pictures
8. Write the names
Go to "add text" and select "add new text"
The default text is white so we can't see it in our white background but it's there trust me. I use the font "Georgia", color black and size 24. Once again, this is just my personal preferance.
Use the guides to make sure the text aligns perfectly with the picture and done!
Now save time by right clicking the text and then choosing the "duplicate layer" option. It will give you a copy of the text box, just change that name for other on the tree.
And we are done with all the names!
Tomorrow the final part of the tutorial (this time for real). I'll show the hardest part of the process: drawing the lines!
Surrounded by a huge entourage, Mary I was dressed in purple velvet and purple satin, all richly adorned with gold and pearls, and wore a gold neckpiece closely worked with pearls and precious stones. Even her horse had a purple caparison worked with gold, which reached to the ground. This was perhaps the first manifestation of the female equivalent to that visual majesty recently made familiar by posture and rich dress in Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII and echoed in the stance of Edward VI in several portraits that followed. A properly demure Tudor woman could hardly imitate that masculine stance with legs apart and arms akimbo, but there were, as Mary now demonstrated, other ways to communicate visible female royal power, circumventing masculine stance and military symbols. Mary’s parliament—with, of course, her prior sanction—passed two pieces of legislation defining fully the status of a queen regnant. One act clarified that a queen had exactly the same regal power as the kings of the English realm had always exercised. The other addressed the status of a queen regnant as wife, reiterating the provisions of the marriage treaties (themselves already approved by parliament and widely promulgated) that Mary remained “solye and sole quene” after her marriage. Mary was indeed both “king and queen” of the realm, legally and in practice. – Judith Richards.
Tbh the cliffhanger ending of season 1 was already a bad sign to me because ending a season like that tends to be a strategy to try to get renewed (which means a season 2 was never a sure thing). And when the showrunners start talking in interviews about all the plans for future seasons? Yeah they definitely don't feel confident about renewal
Hello, today I bring you my very first attempt at a tutorial. Time ago I made a couple of family trees that showed how different royal couples were related. While I only posted two of these trees (on two different blogs) and then abandoned the project, I always wanted to go back to make them, specially since there are a some that I did but never posted.
The trees in question.
The other day I was asked how did I make them, so I thought that this was a great chance to go back to this forgotten project. So more trees are coming. But first, a tutorial of how I made them!
First a disclaimer: while I enjoy making edits I'm not actually super skilled on the art and just managed with the bare minimum edit tools of Pixlr. So this is just how I do it, which is probably not the best way to make these trees. Also I'm not even sure if it is the easiest way lol, but I like making them like this because it gives me a lot of control on how the tree will look like, which genealogy websites do not. Because of Tumblr's image limit this tutorial will be done in two parts.
For this tutorial I'll use a simple first cousins marriage as an example, since this kind of trees only have eight people and therefore are easier to draw. So I'll work with Duke Karl Theodor in Bavaria and his first wife, Princess Sophie of Saxony, who were maternal first cousins.
Let's begin!
1. Do your reasearch.
An obvious first step, I know, but this is absolutely necessary. If you're doing a tree that shows intermarriages then you need to make sure that know exactly how many people will be in your tree, and how they are related to each other. It has happened me that I made the tree and then realized that I missed that two people that were on opposite extremes of the tree were second cousins once removed and now I have to start all over. Almost every royal on Wikipedia has an "Ancestry" section with a mini family tree that goes back like four or five generations, I normally base my trees on that info (because the genealogy enthusiast on the Internet will never let any mistake slide, unlike actual published books). Also a tip: the Spanish version of the Wikipedia articles tend to have bigger trees than the English version. Once you are done, we can move to the next step.
2. Draw your tree (on paper).
This step won't be necessary in our example since it's just an eight persons tree, but if you're doing a bigger one (like the H7 and EoY one) then this step is pretty important. Because trees with a lot of intermarriages are an absolute nightmare to put together if you don't want any lines crossing. So you need to figure out how it will look like before you start editing on Pixlr, otherwise you'll likely end up redoing it many times until you get it right.
Currently I'm working on a big tree that covers tons of marriage, and figuring out how to put it together was legit the hardest part of it. Here is a peak to the last of the many trees I drew, in which I finally managed to make sure no lines crossed (can you guess what is it about?)
As you can see this is just a rough sketch drawn with a pencil on a page of my French notebook. I don't even bother writing the names, this is just to figure out how I'm going to organize these people on the tree. Of course if you don't find this necessary you can skip this step and plan the tree however you like, this is just how I do it.
3. Get the pictures for your tree
I usually just download the person's default profile picture on their Wikipedia page and call it a day lol; but if I can choose I try to choose pictures that depict the people around the time they got married (that's why I chose Ludovika and Max's portraits from their twenties instead of photographs of them at an older age). If the spouses pictures face each other the better, but I don't bother too much if they don't.
My advice is that you download all the pictures you'll use before we can move to the final step of part 1 of this tutorial.
4. Crop the pictures and turn them into PNGs.
Finally, we can start working on Pixlr! Open pixlr.com, the website will give you three different options of editors. I use the simple version, Pixlr X, since these trees don't require many tools.
Now open one of the picture you chose. I chose this photography of Sophie of Saxony, which is both her default Wikipedia profile picture and my favorite picture of her. The first tool we'll need from the side bar is the "Crop & rotate"
Once in there, crop the photo to show only the person's head:
Now with the photo cropped, we can move unto the next tool we'll use: the "Cutout". What this tool basically do is cutting out the background of your picture and leaving only the shape you chose, I use the circle shape.
This is the end result! Now the picture has an oval shape with transparent background. I usually go back to the "crop & rotate" tool and crop the photo again, so it doesn't have that extra empty space.
Save it as a transparent png and it's done! Now you do that with all the pictures you'll use for your tree. I chose a circle shape, but you can use whatever of the other options you want.
Tomorrow, the second and final part of this tutorial in which I actually will show you the trickiest part of the tree making: drawing the tree on Pixlr!
Oh btw as if this line wasn’t tone deaf enough, she says this literally the next episode
She is talking about the last Sultan of Granada, the kingdom her parents overtook during the Reconquista. Much for respecting the beauty of Islam. Or maybe she meant “I respect the beauty of the Islam palaces my family occupied”?
#my notifs are full with people loosing their mind over that line #i couldn’t believe it made it to the script. she is saying that at the same time that the practice of islam was forbidden in granada #did anyone at any point thought `hey maybe we shouldn’t have the daughter of the creators of the Spanish Inquisition say this (x)
Sorry, I just have to rant about this a bit. I’m not Muslim, but I am a Jewish fan of Tudor history and there are some related issues here, and this really infuriates me.
I find it so, so deeply insulting to write lines like this. Katherine of Aragon did not respect the beauty of Islam. She did not respect the beauty of Judaism. She almost certainly didn’t respect the beauty of any form of Christianity that wasn’t ~the one true Catholic faith~. We have absolutely no evidence that she in any way disagreed with or objected to her parents’ persecutions of Muslims and Jews. Maybe she was sad about it on some level and wished there wasn’t so much death and suffering. On the other hand, maybe she didn’t care at all and thought it was a great thing. But everything we know about her beliefs indicates that, at the basic level, she would not disagree that these people were heretics and her parents were ““saving their souls”” by giving people the choice to convert, die, or be expelled.
That is, honestly, true of most Christian monarchs of the era. Religious tolerance and mutual respect simply wasn’t the ideal for these people. The most Muslims and Jews got was grudging tolerance in some of the more relatively accepting countries. Spain (post-Ferdinand and Isabella’s conquest) and England, the two countries Katherine lived in and identified with, didn’t even offer that much. It was illegal to be anything but Christian in both, and we have no reason to think she saw anything wrong with that. She in fact almost certainly saw it as the correct and pious way to run a country, keeping it ~free of infidels~.
I am always very, very aware of this as I study Tudor history. On one level, I can like and sympathize with these figures, including Katherine. But on the other hand, they are not my friends. They’re complicated people who pretty much all accepted the bigotries of their time without question (even a relatively open-minded monarch like Elizabeth I wasn’t entirely free of it). And if I was living in their time period, they would probably 100% endorse the oppression of me and people like me, and pat themselves on the back for being righteous in doing so.
That’s a very harsh, ugly truth, but it’s one I understand and accept as a mature adult who loves history. To some people, the bigotry of these figures might make them totally unredeemable, and I understand that. Others, like me, might be able to see the the admirable and sympathetic aspects of them, along with their ugly sides. Everyone has a personal place where they’ll draw that line (personally, for example, I can sympathize with Katherine, but I could never feel anything positive towards Ferdinand and Isabella because they did so much direct harm in the Inquisition). I can understand both of those approaches, but what I absolutely can’t understand or deal with is trying to whitewash the ugliness and bigotry away and pretend it didn’t exist.
Putting a line like “I respect the beauty of Islam” in Katherine of Aragon’s mouth doesn’t give me the warm-and-fuzzies about how accepting she is, it just makes me feel like the showrunners are insulting my intelligence. They’re either assuming their audience is too ignorant to understand how ahistorical this is, or that they can’t possibly have the maturity to balance sympathy for the character with awareness of ugly historical truths. I can’t speak for any Muslim fans of the Tudor era, but I find it very hard to believe any of them would feel differently. We know the history that happened here, we know what these people thought and did, please do not try to brush it under the rug and insult us with Woke Gal Katherine of Aragon. You’re making yourselves look worse, not better.
Finally watched ep 8 of Becoming Elizabeth! I don't really have much to say about it to be honest, but I do want to comment about what it seemed to me the most divisive thing from the episode: Mary's attitude towards Elizabeth.
I don't know about you, but I was fully ready for Mary to eventually become an antagonist since before the show premiered, this is an Elizabeth show, there is no scaping that. So Mary plotting against her sister was an expected development. I personally think the main problem with the progression of their relationship is just the show's main problem in general: the pacing sucks lol. Because the show does a terrible job at showing that time has passed it feels as if Mary went from protective elder sister to "actually I never loved you lol" in like two months. Once again: this is a pacing problem. We were six episodes stuck in the Seymour affair, which took place in-universe for about what, a year? And then episode seven is set God knows how long after Seymour's execution: it could well been just days after it, because everyone kept talking about it as it if had been last monday. So imo the progression of Mary and Elizabeth's relationship just feels kinda rushed because the show never makes any indication that years have passed since the beginning. In general I wish that the show had focused more on the Tudor siblings' dynamics instead of... you know, so this development (actually regression because their relationship is worse than ever) would've felt more earned. "I really want to love you but you make it impossible" is the kind of sibling angst that I love so I really hope they lean on this hard on season 2. That scene with Mary and Edward in which they both cry because he is dying and still they cannot set their differences apart?? 10/10, legit made me tear up, give me ten more scenes like that.
TUDOR WEEK 2022
DAY 5 MOST UNDERRATED TUDOR FAMILY MEMBER(S) → CATHERINE DE VALOIS
Catherine de Valois was the daughter of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria. During the Hundred Years War, Catherine was contracted to marry Henry V of England as part of the peace treaty, known as the Treaty of Troyes. Their marriage was intended to pave the way for France and England to cease fighting with Henry V on the throne of England and France. This didn’t happen. Henry V died two years later leaving behind not only the widow Catherine, but their infant son, Henry VI. At some point after Henry V died, Catherine entered into a relationship with Owain Tudor. Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur (or Owen Tudor) was a Welsh courtier from a distinguished family from Penmynydd. At the time of their relationship, Owain was installed as either the keeper of her wardrobe or household. Altogether, Catherine had three sons with Owain and the couple remained together until her death in 1437. Her sons Edmund and Jasper were close with their half-brother, King Henry VI. While there is usually doubt as to the legitimacy of Owain and Catherine’s marriage, an entry in the Parliament Rolls states that Edmund and Jasper (the two eldest sons of Owain and Catherine) were conceived and born within wedlock. This would suggest that some form of evidence or proof of marriage was the basis of this declaration.
For a family tree for Catherine and her children see this → post
I want to thank @richmond-rex for their helpful information on the legitimacy of Catherine and Owain’s marriage and their children. If you love Tudor content, go follow!
Image
1. Catherine of Valois by Edward Hargrave, 1842.
TUDOR WEEK 2022
DAY 6 FAVORITE TUDOR SIBLING RELATIONSHIP → MARY AND ELIZABETH TUDOR
As with many Tudor relationships, Mary and Elizabeth’s was a complicated one. Mary’s and Elizabeth’s mothers were enemies, but their relationship was tied up in the father they shared and the legitimacy that was denied them. Carol Levin of the University of Nebraska from her paper “Elizabeth I Among Her Siblings” describes the relationship between Elizabeth and her siblings aptly:
“Elizabeth’s relationships with her siblings caused her danger and anxiety. In many ways Elizabeth had little freedom over how she would relate to her siblings; these relationships were predetermined by the political and religious religious constraints of the time, which made uncomplicated familial affection impossible.”
The Paradise State Bed (c. 1485)
The marriage bed of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York
This exceptional survivor is England’s only medieval bed. Its symbolism reveals how Henry and Elizabeth viewed themselves as they began a 117-year-old dynasty that transformed England. They present themselves as saviours to conclude their families’ civil war, ‘the Wars of the Roses’. As the image of Christ and the Virgin Mary they triumph over evil as they overturn the sin of Adam and Eve. These figures are surrounded by biblical themes and medieval fertility symbols — acorns, grapes and strawberries — besides marigolds and daisies, red and white roses not yet combined (x).
