Greek and Roman Art: The Clouds

Author: Aristophanes, a comedian from Athens. 

Time Period: (450-388BC)

Location: Written/preformed in Athens, during the festival paying tribute to the god Dionysus, who was the divine god of most Greek recreational activities. 

Yes, this is my own photo. (I worked
so hard to make this one just perfect!)

The Clouds is considered, by many scholars who study on the subject of historical drama, to be the first play ever written where the central purpose is to achieve the crowd’s laughter all the way through its duration, or simply put, a comedy.  The story is an almost textbook case of irony, as the main character’s motives end up being the result of his own misery in the end.

Interesting Facts:

The play, believe it or not, actually has nothing to do with clouds at all!  The word clouds is used in place of the word gods, and implies that the gods are against the main character in the story and only want to punish him for sending his son away to the Thinkery for his own self interests.  How sad. 

Although the play has been translated into many international & non-Greek languages, there is no written copy in existence of the original ancient Greek text before it was revised.  It is thought that some of the things had to be reworded in order for it to make sense to foreign audiences, so a few minor details of The Clouds may have been lost in translation.  

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Further Reading: 

1. http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/netshots/clouds.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds

It's a 'White Easter' this year in New Brunswick

I'm supposed to look overjoyed in this sketch,
not sad!  (Just so you know the difference.)

This week, even though it was short, was a hard one to pull through.  I had set myself set up pretty bad after missing Monday's classes at school, and the staying at home to work on my speech got me nowhere.  I felt like I was only digging a deeper whole with my schoolwork in general, and just as I figured would happen, my pain and suffering was only an allusion to a sudden metaphorical growth.

This week's moping seemed to bring me out of my trance.  I've been so consumed and drawn into my academics as of late that I seemed to forget who I was and why I'm here, as I do so often.  Every now and again I need to remind myself that my marks aren't everything; they aren't the basis of how well I'm doing, they are only one aspect of my life!  Well-being, for me right now, should be based on just how content I am with myself, my social life and my art.  However, when an outside force begins to command all of my attention, I seem to let the others slip and fall into a trap.  Luckily, towards the end of the week, I seemed to find myself again; I know where I'm headed and have gotten my bearings straight!  (It's about time, hmm?)

I have come to realize that in one a quarter year's time, I graduate!  That's a big deal.  It means a lot to me.  And so once I graduate, my life isn't going to be based on whether or not I know "What combines with hydrogen to produce water?" but on how skilled I am as an artist.  Let's face it, artists don't need much in the way of grades to get into their courses.  Nope!  You need dexterity and determination, talent and will power!  Enough of this stressing over things that in two years time mean nothing to me... My mind is now set on art!

I feel like I need some art and blogging therapy right now, so I'm going to fill you guys in about what I've been working on:

• Page Four of my comic (Now set aside until more concept art has been completed.)  
• Maps: Over the course of this month, I have come to develop a real 'finalized' version of the map that includes all the major locations needed to tell the main story of my comic.  
• Settings: I have sectioned off different regions of the map and tried to use my imagination in constructing what I feel some of the places should look like as seen from the eyes of a bird soaring over the various kinds of structures and terrain. 
• Character designs: I have just resurrected a couple of the characters that will have a major appearance in the first book.  My art style has developed over the months since I have undertaken this project.  
• Blog Posts (Here are a list of ones that are currently in the drafting state): "Welcome to the Internet, Mus'ka", How to scare a Nerd (saving this one for next Halloween), Picture Storage (only used to hold the odd image as I travel from one computer to another; disregard), Len Square (A post about my efforts in trying to make a cartoon version of myself for my blog), Seventeen (A post from a back in January that never made it out.  I don't know if my vision for it is still the same?), Deviously Cute (Reviewing my experience in designing a t-shirt of the deviantART 'Cute Monsters' contest), Another Winter Shelter (I will give instructions on how to make a shelter out of fallen trees and snow.  Originally written for my outdoor pursuits class at school.),  Pokemon and Nostalgia (describing what it felt like to start to replay Pokemon Blue as a teenager), How to Build a Quinzhee (instructions to building a secure snow fort; another OP class creation.  Plus, an inked and coloured version of one of my comic's settings as part of its concept art.), *{There are many more that are in the planning stages and just haven't made it into drafts yet...} 
• Tidying Up: Going back and fixing various grammatical and spelling errors I've made in my earlier posts. Rethinking the use of some of the tags that you see at the top of this page.  
• Photography: I've dug out my camera again, so lately I've been taking lost of photos!  My cousin has really inspired me with her sudden interest in photography.  I was inhibited by Vista's horrible way of organizing stored images, but now with windows seven, I feel much more comfortable in trying this.  (Fingers crossed!  Hope I can get some nice ones to my blog without too many problems.)
• My Themed Life: This part of my blog and deviantART is currently on pause in real life (I have assigned no theme for myself this week.)  I have many posts backed up that I would still like to get out there for my audience with my two themes Pokemon and The Hunger Games, so until I've worked the life out of them, I am at a pause with this.  

Below is a list of posts that are either finished or in the making for the "My Themed Life" section of my blog:

• Pokemon Week: Favourite Pokemon (completed), Replaying Pokemon Blue (have information written down, drew some sketches, still trying to finish the game up to the point where I can carry out the 'Mew Glitch'), Outdoor photography featuring my Game Boy Colour and I in a winter landscape (Photos have been taken, downloaded and selected.  Written portion of post still needs to be done; no draft has been created), Pokemon Black and White 2: My reaction (nothing has been done yet.)
• Hunger Games Week: How I Pictured Things (need to find and make copies of cartoon characters that look like the ones I saw in my head while reading, no write-up has been attempted), One With Nature (made sketches almost daily for a week, photography has been taken, no write-up has been done), My Hunger Games Strategy (just a though... nothing done.)

I mentioned above about doing colourized versions of different settings in my comic.  Since this is a frosty scene, I thought that I'd couple it in with this post just so all of you good lads and lasses can have a looksy.

This is the rough draftwork I made while sorting out how I wanted the Southern-most region of the fictional world to look. 

I am really excited about this one!  Through different sources I've found online about beta versions of video games, movies and such, I have discovered that the concept art plays a big role in achieving a concrete model of how you want things to look in the end for your product and that if I want to make all of my panels featuring vast and complex backgrounds to look anyways congruent, then I need to try and replicate this somehow.  So I've tossed my main pages aside and started in on concept art. 

I know that it's only the penciled version, put it's looking pretty good for something that only took me a couple of minutes to sketch.  Good copy will be coming soon in the post "How to build a Quinzhee."

As the title of this post implies, it is Easter and there is snow on the ground.  How's that for being Canadian?

We went from having this one day...

To this the next.

I can honestly say that this is not an uncommon sight here in New Brunswick, and I have many earlier-childhood memories of running about outside searching for Easter eggs in the snow with my cousins, while trying to dodge the odd snowball.  What fun!
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Oh!  I just looked at the clock and noticed that it is now past twelve.... So much for having this posted on Easter Sunday.  :|  (Frowny face)  "~Happy Easter Monday, Ya'l!!!"
I went skiing directly after making this.  I just couldn't stand all this excitement! 

Summer Falls

     I can't believe the change in the colours of the leaves this week here in Atlantic Canada! (Yes, and I do mean colours and not colors; and for all of my American viewers out there, the proper Canadian spelling for the word is actually that.)  It really is an eventful thing when the leaves begin to change, isn't it?  I think that I would really miss it if I were living someplace else in the world where the changing of the seasons did not include the bright yellows, the vibrant oranges and the deep reds that cover the landscape every fall.

    On top of the lovely scenery that we had this weekend, we were also blessed with fine weather.  Temperature in the twenties for Thanksgiving?! What kind of trick of the senses is this?  In any case, this presented me with the perfect opportunity to get some good sketching done; and so I did:

     For this one I hauled a folding lawn chair across our back yard and plopped it down so that it was facing the field and the forest behind my house.  I was actually a little saddened at first with the way how this one turned-out after I looked at how it appeared on the computer screen after I had scanned it, but now that I see it miniaturized in my post, I don't feel as bad about it and am actually quite content.
     When I sketch, often times the pencil marks are so light that a great deal of them don't get picked up by the scanner.  This is an example where that kind of thing happens to the image, but a simple change in the images resolution may just do the trick.

     A funny thing happened while I was making this picture, my dog, who is sometimes at my side when I am doing these kind of drawings, suddenly got the notion that it would be a good Idea to sniff-out the largest pile of animal droppings in the field... and ROLL IN IT!!!!! Yipes!  Yeah, I know, hilarious... but it wasn't for me at the time.  It still cracks me up a little when I picture myself sitting peacefully in my lawn chair, thinking about how nice of a day it was, when all of a sudden... zoom!  She didn't even gave me enough time to grab her before she began diving her way into it. (I swear it was large enough for her to do the back stroke through it!)
    Chloe is a small dog, so it didn't take much for her to make it seen as though she were in a state of complete and total mess, and she wasn't aloud back inside of the house for a while, or at least until she was cleaned.  My father and I gave her a bath, which is a routine thing for us now on the occasions that we let the dog run around the yard without the use of her tether.  But, man! Was she ever smelly!

     I had a good thanksgiving though, did you?  I managed to keep myself busy with all of the family-visiting, trips to town and whatnot, but I wish I could say the same about my comic.  I am a little stalled at the moment, that is not to say that nothing is getting done to it (I have worked out much of the plots beyond the pre-story legend that I am publishing to the internet now), but I usually have a page readily available to work on in the evenings after I come home from school.  This week so far, no such page exists and I feel as though a massive void of discomfort has been added to my day.  I should now make an initiative to empty that void of all its stresses and fill it full of the thing I feel most good about doing rate now, my comic.
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*Just a little side-note, here.  Although most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving on the forth Thursday in November, us Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on a different date, the second Monday in October!  Neat hun?  I think that it has something to do with fact that Canada is further away from the equator than the United States, and thus the harvest are more earlier in the year.
When I think of November, I don't picture pumpkins and scarecrows.  For me, and many other Canadians, November means freshly fallen snow and the first taste of winter.

I sometimes find it interesting how the slight distance in our surroundings can change the way that we perceive common things in the world...

Harvest Moon Boosts Production! -100%!!!! (not really)

  As I sat working at my desk the other night, I couldn't help but feel inspired.  My bedroom (which has now been converted into my own personal office and work-space) is situated at the back side of my house, and its window faces the Eastern portion of the sky.  On a normal night, the view from my second story window provides an excellent view of the celestial bodies (a perfect atmosphere for inventive and creative thinking), but this night was an extra special night, and I couldn't miss a chance like that to get my creative juices flowing.

  For those of you that don't know very much about the moon or it's fazes, us space-savvy people could tell you that the moon of two nights ago was more than just the full moon, it was also a very special kind of moon, the harvest moon, and a beautiful one at that! 

  As a self-taught, young, aspiring artists, I tend to seek inspiration in the simplest of things.  From the way that a leaf floats across a gentle moving stream, to the shadow that is created by a tree in a park; true artists must come to identify the simple mechanics and principles that make our world tick, and one of the biggest of those inspirations for me is the night sky! 

  As you tour around my site, I am sure you will find that my love of space sometimes shines through in my artwork, and I am positive that this won't be the last time I mention of this.  Anyway, the whole purpose of me telling you this is so that I could convey to you just how inspired I am, and to tell you that future work to my comic is underway!  My second page is looking considerably better than my first and I would like to have it posted somewhere towards the end of this weekend.  On average, I want to rev-up my production to one page-per-week, but still no promises on that.  I am beginning to gauge my own production speed for the time being, so that I can learn how to increase it as I move along.  You can also expect to see my blog get a well-deserved face lift in the next couple of days, probably after my second page is posted, so there are lots of stuff going-on here indeed!  I'm sorry that I couldn't post my 2nd page sooner than what you would be hoping for, but for now you are just going to have to deal with my lengthy and long-winded pages of text.  

  But,Cheer Up! (there's more to come.)

(Yes, I am well aware that the image I used in this post comes from Akira Himekawa's manga adaptation of 'The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask', but it is my own version of her drawing and it was the only image that I found on my computer that best fits the content of this page.  PLEASE FORGIVE ME NINTENDO! I mean you no harm...-.-")