Platypus of Truth

Every year, in honor of Michael Ward's groundbreaking Planet Narnia , I award seven Summer reading books with to one of the seven heavens of Medieval cosmology. Prior awards can be found by following the "Summer Reading" tag at the bottom of this post. This year presents a bit of a challenge, as most of the books I read were technical in nature, but I think there were still enough idle hours to get us to our requisite "Seven Heavens". Moon: The Heaven of Madness and Change belongs this year to Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, as he appears in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman . I kinda, sorta, got this series in grad-school -it was perhaps too much for me at the time. All things have their season, however, and right now seems to be my time for The Sandman . Mercury: The Heaven of Language goes to the most well-written grammar for any language I've studied: Wheelock's Latin . All one has to do is pick up Hanson and Quinn's Greek to see the massive differ...

Here's yesterday's church bulletin with the drawings colored in. Polychrome on Greek pots was muted, but Etruscan funeral painting had quite a bit of life to it and may hint at what all those lost Greek panel paintings looked like. That said, the colors I picked for the designs still have a vibrantly modern look though I tried to restrain my pallette somewhat as a nod to the originals.

Happy day after Hobbit Day everyone! In addition to language learning, much of the past few months has been taken up with studying archaeology and art history including a trip to the Getty Center (Egypt: Beyond the Nile) and a symposium at the Lanier (United Israelite Kingdom Seminar). Along the way, I've been studying the distinctive designs of Greek polei, Scythian tribes, and Etruscan city-states. So, to get all that out of my system, I decided to illuminate this Sunday's church bulletin in a medley of styles with a little Art Nouveau thrown in for good measure. As Summer is also on its way out, I will be trying to put together another "Seven Heavens of Summer Reading" awards list. We'll see if there's enough "summer reading" to qualify, given how technical things have been lately. In the meantime, the Platypus speaks Truth.

We were in L.A. for a few days and that necessitated some in flight distractions. So, in between reading Juvenal's Sixteen Satires , I tried my hand at a bit of design work with a ballpoint pen. I'm hoping this sort of doodling will help up my game a bit. You can see earlier attempts studding the edges of a few of my Sabriel  series below.