Bloom - The Renewal of an Idea

Inspired by the creative challenge issued Sunday by the lovely creative spirits at Pixie Hill, I took the word "Bloom" and decided to see where it took me.

I am much more of an Autumn soul than a Spring one and I never am at a loss for creative ideas and a to-do list a mile long. . . so then, what would "Bloom" bring up in my own creative world?

Well, for me, it does mean renewal. . . so how about the renewal of an old idea?

Bookmaking. . .

I have dabbled, many times over the years, in the art of bookbinding. Never seriously but always with the knowledge that the ideas I would love to bring to life in that realm would definitely fit my work and my expression of possibility and magic.

I tend to get excited whenever I have down time (rarer all the time these days)  about the art of bookbinding and I'll jot down ideas, start on covers, buy book cloth, binding tape, waxed linen thread etc etc. . . so all of the necessary supplies are here. I just never seem to take those ideas to the completed stage and get sidetracked with orders and finishing the work for my shoppe.

Well, the last two days while recovering from eye surgery, I thought "OK, here it is, a bit of time with a chance to try to renew this idea.

The results are as follows:

A blank spell book, perhaps left behind intentionally for a human child to write their dreams and wishes, large or small, within? 

The completed small, blank Elven Spell Book with ribbon marker 1.75" x 2.5"

An incantation in "Elven font" on the facing page. . . this spell allows the person who writes their dreams within the book to have them protected and spell-bound by the magical wee folk.

A map of my imaginary world (still in progress) of The Bewildering Pine where the elven folk of my little paracosm reside.

The cover is an antique book cover printed on archival linen paper. I want to try staining the inner pages and adding little printed symbols etc here and there for the final versions.

 It's really a wonderful thing to get outside the usual mode of my creative production and try something new . . . or, at least, renewed! I can't tell you how many years I have been dreaming of making little books. . .  though most of my ideas are not for blank paged books but, instead, for almost-filled "sketchbooks" that a fairy might "lose" or leave behind in your garden with sketches like these I completed a while ago: 

The font is slightly askew which leaves for me to include "translations" in the packaging! :)

Faerie Garden Obelisks

Cataloging of Vegetables, Flowers and Insects of course are part of the design.

Yes, I think it's time. . . . Spring. . . . ideas do bloom too. . .. so, thanks, to Nichola, for the gentle nudge of inspiration to allow these to do so!

A very magical and happy Spring to all!

nicolas

The Long and Short Of It All - Edition #1

One of the things about my way of creating that gets wonky sometimes is:

I have a longstanding habit, when choosing the "What next?" from my list of ideas, to go with the smaller, most immediately rewarding ideas. Often this is at the expense of moving forward the larger, more complex ideas that I really want to bring to a completion but that I can't seem to keep moving forward on as time allows. Instead, always seeming to choose the quick idea, or a multitude of them as it often goes, to "finish something".

Nowhere is this more relevant that my 2014 To-Do list and I am resolved to do something about it! 

So first, why is that an issue? I make oodles of fun creations that actually move through my shops very well. They make me infinitely happy to create them and I always find time to write a bit of a story to go along with almost each one. . . couple that with an ever growing list of requests and custom pieces and the time left to work on the larger stories and idea is already at a minimum. 

But those ideas haunt me as they are always the thing I most want to do every day.

Internally those larger. story based projects are the direct reflection of everything I loved about my childhood and want to re-embrace into the fold of mid adulthood and beyond. They are the lifeline from that era, the link in time to all I am and all I do.

They are my "Tardis" through time and space that take me back to the most wonderful and,  yes, sometimes less wonderful of those years too.

And ohhhhh I am a time traveler above all else. . . 

I am hoping, that by sharing the ideas here in a series of posts of their progress and intent,  the visual reminder of them each time I come to my blog will remind me that they are waiting for me to grow them into full reality.And with each large project I will also post a small, quick idea that came to fruition too. :)

So then

The LONG of It:

The Noble Ice Elves of Spangladasha:

Started this massive idea at the beginning of the year and it is only in the last 4 weeks that it sort of fell off the radar a bit. The little guy below, Fenewen, was the first to appear here. He toldme his story and I was beyond hooked. . . T

he idea is to create a total of 50 Noble Ice Elves ( not all at once mind you) and send each one, as it is adopted, off into the world with an atlas/maps of their land, Spangladasha, and scrolls that tell the story of the elves journey to our world and their purpose here and beyond.

The very-large of the idea is to send quarterly updates to each person as the elves are adopted letting them know the general location of other elves across the globe (by city/country only) and continuing the story through mailings of scrolls, symbols, etc etc as well as updating the Etsy listing with the story as it progresses as new elves appear.  So even I will not know exactly where it is going until it gets there.

Fenewen

I LOVE his furry compact body, the crown of polymer clay bones and his "petrified" driftwood power source with it's "ice crystal" attached!! And the ever growing map of the land he and his kind hail from:

Spangladasha - Realm of the Noble Ice Elves

Soooo much more to do obviously. Scrolls, books, wax seals, printing the maps, special packaging etc etc. The Noble Ice Elf story is about 5 pages now. That's about as long as I want it so I'll have a years worth of updates already in the bag. I just need to rewrite, edit and re-edit. 

Hoping to have 6 or so of these guys ready for Fall release! 

And that, my dear friends, is just ONE of the large ideas brewing in this brain lately. :)


The SHORT of it:

The Shen Amulet

So, the Egyptian pieces in Shadow of the Sphinx are a direct link to my early creative worlds  I imagined myself often in that time, often as a simple scribe or lay-person working for a Pharaoh. It was a far broader role to me than to rule all of Egypt. lol

The endless list of ancient pieces I have to inspire me has allowed me to continually experience a new thrill when working on these amulets and statues. And often, the ideas allow me to create quickly as with the Shen amulet below.  There must be hundreds of iterations of this one amulet/symbol alone.  So the inspirational source is endless.

Shen Symbol - Polymer Clay Amulet with Bronze Patina Finish

Trouble is I often get caught up in the fun of making smaller things and just let the larger ideas sit a bit too long. . . but then again, Fenewen is always on my work table and he won't be patient for long I suspect. . .

Wishing you all a creative and magical day!

Soon again. . .


nicolas

The Mapmaker's War

The Mapmaker's War. . . I am currently submerged in this wonderful book by Ronlyn Dominique

Often it can be the first line or few paragraphs of a book that really draws me in. . . this one went beyond pulling me in with the following early narrative. . .

With meticulous care, you planned your provisions, though not your expeditions. 

Adventure wasn’t in the hunger to come but in the quest of what to follow. You packed your pouch | nuts and fruit, soft bread and hard cheese | along with parchment and ink, cloth scraps and straight edges.

You mapped the hidden worlds when you were still young enough to see them.

Spiderwebs and honeycombs taught the wisdom of symmetry. To you, everything before your eyes was built upon invisible lines and angles. The very spot where you stood only a point among many. A girl is not always in her place, you thought. A girl can be many places at once. And so you were. When you settled upon a space in the forest or meadow, you made a grid on the earth with small steps and tiny flags until there were row upon row of even little squares. You took your seat within the grid. You moved from square to square, noting what stood still and what passed by. All day long you observed and measured, sketched and colored. That which was off the edges appeared on the parchment as well. There were mysterious realms of bees and ants and creatures never seen before, with tiny castles and bright gardens.

 
In my previous post, Paracosm, I spoke about the beginnings of my imaginative childhood worlds and how they have been with me all through my life, even when I tried to put them aside. . .

This book took me immediately back to those days and the themes within it, mostly mythic and universal, truly touched a part of my soul that recognized it instantly as kin.

I feel like this is my charge again, among the worlds that others often neglect and, in some cases, never see. There is work to be done and many uncharted places to visit here. . .

Mapmaking is much more than pen to paper

It is about perspective and acute observation
It's about seeing with something more than our eyes
It's a visual poetry

When we look at early maps, what do you see? Do you see the world as you now know it NOT to be and think, "Oh, they had it so wrong then!" or do you simply surrender to the wonder and beauty of it, of the time and place and the impossible motivation that made people create them?

How we see maps tells a lot about us too. . . 

What a good mapmaker sees, or what a mapmaker reads are more than pinpoints and land plots.
There is nothing finite about a map and the good ones seem to have no beginning and no end.
Like the art of writing kanji, each line begins off the page and then, on the other end, the motion and movement which are always present, carries the brush off the into space. 

It is not a series of points.  . but the motion of a living, breathing entity.

It does not end.

And so, again, I hammer home the point (to myself) that where we come from, the formative parts of our imagination, the maps we made, have no end.

If we try to constrain it to a page
A part of our history
A finite set of coordinates
It is incomplete.

Maps of all kinds change too
Constantly

There is a second story I love and often return to that has this same effect on me. You can, of course, read this one too but you can also HEAR it read on the podcast, Selected Shorts, if you are inspired enough to dig for it online.

It's called "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez

Of course, the pattern here, for my own purposes, is telling.

I am always returning to the mapmaker within
The charts and excursions of my youth.
My landscapes

Nothing stays the same and that is why we should, I believe, revisit and remap those spaces too. . .
it's why I intend to do so for the remainder of my days . . . my motion in a lifetime that also began off the page, appeared, and will one day exit into space again.

And through it all, I will remember this line from "The Mappist", to help keep my sense of placeas I go

“don’t make the mistake of thinking you, or I or anyone, knows how the world is meant to work. The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark. We’re lighting candles. Those maps- they are my candles. And I can’t extinguish them for anyone.””

Make your maps. dive into YOUR landscapes, and most of all tell and retell your stories as your miracle unfolds.

~nicolas