Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.
My This Land Is Mine fabric (see this post) finally arrived from Spoonflower. I quilted it and hung it on the wall.
I ordered one version with a white background, and one with a dark background.
Spoonflower does a great job printing colors, but the darks get muddy. The navy/grey background was indistinguishable from the black details. Sewing outlines in white thread helped, but I still prefer the white background.
Months ago I had the idea to design some This Land Is Mine fabric, get it printed by Spoonflower, and quilt on it. But I never got around to the designing part until today. What do you think? Light background, or dark? The design of This Land Is Mine was inspired by Assyrian wall reliefs, and this expands on the style. I’ve never used Spoonflower before but it seems worth a try.
I just felt like making this font, so I did. I have no particular use for it. I guess making the hieroglyphs activated the font part of my brain, or something. It’s not a real font (I no longer have Fontographer software), just letter designs. If anyone wants to make a real, functional font out of this, lemme know and I’ll send you .ai or .eps files.
Hieroglyphs are an important design element in Egyptian painting. To make my Egypt scenes look right, I’ll need to include some as decoration. So today I made myself an abridged “alphabet” in Flash. What I didn’t expect was how much fun it is to make messages with them.
Guess what this says!
Designs for Seder-Masochism continue with the “furniture of the Tabernacle.” Since I want to show the Hebrews out in the desert fighting with Yahweh and each other, I had to make all this anally-specific Tabernacle decor. For all the important details the Old Testament seems to have left out, it is packed with rigidly precise instructions for building, decorating, and furnishing a Tabernacle. Leaving us today with Tabernacle Nerds who make Tabernacle drawings, Tabernacle plans, model Tabernacles, and critiques of other Tabernacle Nerds who iz doing it wrong.
And I just know some Tabernacle Nerd will tell me my Tabernacle is wrong, and back it up with scripture. It’s like Trekkies who cite Star Trek verse and number, except the genre isn’t labelled science fiction.
All this stuff has to do is evoke a sense of Tabernacle, a certain Tabernaculosity if you will.
I haven’t even started the tent walls yet, because finding the color instructions will require me to re-read some of the dullest passages ever written (unless you’re an interior designer).
I designed some Hebrews for Seder-Masochism. Doing all 12 tribes was too daunting, but I’m calling the additions to Moses and Aharon Fatiman, Menorah, and Asher* respectively.
There aren’t a lot of representational images in Jewish art – not compared to rich delicious pagan religious art traditions like Hinduism and Catholicism – but there are a lot of visual symbols, which hopefully people will recognize. (The Hand of Fatimah isn’t Jewish per se, but it is popular in the region that includes Israel.)
I also made a little “before and after” illustrating what happened to the Levites in Exodus (hint: the Levites wrote Exodus):
*The Tribe of Asher is usually symbolized by a tree. I further simplified by using a leaf. Lately I’ve been reading Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, which I’m enjoying very much despite its archeology being out of date. Asherah was a popular Goddess in Canaan during the Hebrew reign, and she was often symbolized by a tree. So when I was doing some research on the 12 Tribes, I was a little stunned to see one called Asher, with a tree symbol. Maybe these were some of the Israelites who pissed off Yahweh by worshipping idols – that would be cool, but we’ll never know, since they’re Lost.