What do you want this Founder's portrait art to look like? Please list the physical description, Action & Magic, Clothing, Accessories, and Background that you would like to see for Flambeau's portrait.
A tanned Mediterranean man, with a bushy black beard, wearing a leather armour with a sword in one hand and a flaming wand in the other, probably a metal crucifix around his neck too and the sea shell of the pilgrims of Santiago di Compostella to highlight his religious nature. Probably shooting a pilum of flame through his wand, pointing slightly to the side so thattje pilum.is seen side-on.
Flambeau stands in a mountain pass, battling a Sahir and his jinn.
Flambeau is of Southern French / Iberian appearence. He wears leather armour and a helmet, and is well into his middle age. He has a generally hardbitten appearance about him - weathered, scars, etc, but still has a certain presence. Below the leather he is dressed in dark red. With one hand he points a staff at his enemies. The staff is largely practical - sturdy and shod with iron, it could be used as a weapon or a travelling aid; less obviously practically, it has a ruby the size of a walnut fixed to the upper end.
Protecting Flambeau are two shield grogs, both grizzled veterans. They bear shields with crosses (but probably not of St James, as on researching it I think he didn't become a big thing in Spain until the ninth century, which is probably a little late, sadly).
His enemies consist of a Moorish Sahir, a wind jinni, a large stone jinni, and a fire jinni. The Sahir is seated upon a rug borne up by a whirlwind created by the wind jinni. He wears chain mail over andalusian robes, and has a helmet that rises to a point. The wind jinni has no physical body as such; however, dust and other debris contrive to make out its face and upper body. The fire jinni has a body that appears to be made out of copper or brass, with the upper body and legs sculpted into armour. It has a haughty expression, and has just thrown a copper coloured ball of fire at the shield grogs - where it is washing over them harmlessly thanks to the protection of the Parma Magica. The stone jinn is large and craggy. It is thundering towards the shield grogs, who are bracing themselves for its impact.
Lances of fire streak towards the sahir, stone jinn and wind jinn, as Flambeau multi-casts 9(?) pilums of fire at his enemies.
[Is Mastery 8 of Pilum of Fire overkill even for Flambeau? I did wonder a little about including the shield grogs as "standing behind the mundanes" isn't really a part of Flambeau's legend, but any magus with an ounce of sense has at least one shield grog, and Flambeau was a combat veteran.]
My thought process: We're talking 180xp. Best case scenario is that he has Flawless Magic (which isn't implausible, although I don't think there's any explicit canon support for it either), in which case he's effectively capped at 10xp per season (as you say, he's going to have little to no Tractatus access). That makes 18 seasons applying xp to it, or a little under 5 years. That's quite a lot, but it's not utterly ridiculous, and it looks better if you assume a lot of those xp are either from adventuring (which we know he did quite a lot) or that he somehow had the fire spell he'd spent years refining prior to meeting Trianoma convert into Pilum of Fire with mastery after he switched to the Hermetic Arts.
True. Though Flambeau never struck me as someone with Flawless Magic
Without FM, that's 36 (aka 9 years!) seasons devoted to training a specific spell (or Story XPs, obviously), in addition to the time devoted to inventing it in the first place.
That's a LOT. What else could he have done with that time?
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it feels unlikely to me. CErtainly working up to Master 9 in BoAF was very slow indeed.
Flambeau is noted for having spent a lot of time obsessively improving one spell, which feels spell-mastery adjacent, at least. He was also a combat wizard, which Flawless Magic is good for. I don't have much more to go off than that, though.
I think the key point is "a lot of Pilae" (that and "not aimed at the Fire Jinn, it's almost certainly immune and he'll deal with it with Perdo Ignem later"). Preferably comfortably more than a newly gauntleted school-of-the-Founder magus could plausibly have at gauntlet (probably Mastery 5 given age limits, i.e. 6 pilae), as you don't want to make him look weak relative to them.
(Yes, I realise a newly gauntletted magus could theoretically end up with more than Mastery 8 if you ignore the age limits, but there's a difference between "I took Flawless Magic and Mastered Spells, and bought Mastery of Pilum of Fire 6" and "I took Flawless Magic and a bunch of xp granting virtues and sunk every xp I didn't need for Creo Ignem 20 into getting Mastery 12").
The spell that Flambeau developed probably didn't look a lot like pilum of fire; that's what came out when Bonisagus got his hands on it. What he was using was probably something more like a Mercurian ritual which he somehow figured out how to make fast. So I don't think your picture need be too plausible under the rules of Hermetic magic; he wasn't using that, yet.
Brown eyes, short brown hair, tanned. Strong muscular build with erect posture, burn scars (from learning fire magic) along with old scars across his face. Grim expression.
Action & Magic:
In a battle with several Sahirs and thier various types of animal and elemental jinn. Flambeau should be shooting pilums of fire at them and doding the Sahirs' attacks.
Clothing: A dug up mish mash of metal scale and maybe even old roman legionnaire armor.
Accessories: A large array of weapons, with a notable stack of javellins on his back.
Background: Should be over something suitably epic - a castle or some natural enviromental vista - on fire.
