Three more small fry. One of these I've been hanging on to for a while—not because there's anything wrong with it, but simply because I didn't want to overwhelm people. However, on FORKNI-L, Andrew C. asked me if I was planning to do an icon for the Diviants, suggesting I use a Roman theme. I promised him their icon would be included in the next group I posted; so here it is.

The other two are much more recent. I just did them last week.

One is for the Academy. This isn't a faction that appears on any but the longest lists. Why, I don't know. I don't think I'm the only person with a soft spot for Aristotle, but few people declare the affiliation.

The third icon is for the Cross-Stitchers of the Knight. How many of them there were, I don't know: it was definitely a specialist faction, if there ever was! Its members were quite active within its parameters, though. There was a time when they did FK-themed cross-stitch projects and shared patterns with each other—and more, for some of them wrote a long round-robin story together.





Diviants:

Before anything else, I had to decide which Divia I wanted to depict: the demure Roman maiden or the vicious, leather-clad vampire. In the end, I went with the former. That, after all, is the image that her father holds in his memory. Very misleading, as Vachon discovered. This sweet girl is as ageless and heartless as Peter Pan.

For the main motif, I turned (as Andrew later suggested) to Divia's Roman origins. I know there's a tendency to associate her with Egypt, and hence use Egyptian motifs; but we have no idea how long she and LaCroix lived there, for all that they adopted a form of Egyptian dress. We do know, though, that she came from Pompeii.

Pompeii, of course, is associated forever with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. This has been oft painted; and I had no difficulty in discovering a considerable choice in images. All I had to do was pick one from which I could crop a nice square background. (The operative word in that sentence, by the way, is "could". A lot of pictures did not lend themselves to that sort of cropping.)

The background dominates the icon, leaving little room for more than a picture of Divia and the name of the faction. However, the Diviants are an old enough faction to have had an affiliation pin. Its symbol was a black and white picture of the cameo pendant that Divia wore—the one she put in the box with the decapitated head in "Ashes to Ashes". So I wanted to work that in somehow; and you can see it in the lower left corner of the icon.




Academy:

Aristotle only appeared in one episode, but it was memorable. The Academy, however, is a very tiny faction. It does have a small website; and clearly there once were a couple of Forever Knight fans who tried to drum up interest in forming a group for him. However, it never came to much.

He therefore does not have an official faction symbol. Looking through his main scene in "Forward into the Past", though, I picked out one motif to characterize his efforts in the past: a messy-looking (but no doubt well organized) stack of file folders. For the present, I picked a contemporary computer monitor. And then I added a rubber stamp, in honour of a stunning view of a table full of similar ones, presumably used to add versimilutude to forged documents.

All of this was best set out on the simplest of backgrounds.




Cross-Stitchers of the Knight:

I knew from the start that I wanted to do this icon using cross-stitch fabric as the background and a stitch-like font for the letters. However, it had to wait until I found a font that I liked. To ensure that the point is clear, I added a needle—carefully cut in two and fitted "through" the fabric (with the two pieces lined up!)—and drew a free-hand line to represent the tag of thread.

The icon is finished with a selection of embroidery silks. The picture I liked for form was not in the most "FK" colour scheme, though, so I changed it to a pleasing red selection. Of course, I then had to crop out the labels from the original and patch them over, since their colour had also been shifted. North American embroiderers will immediately recognize the brand!