Laume's Studio

I did art!

I joined an art deck swap, my first ever. The theme was Between the Worlds and you could do anything that reminded you of Halloween, Samhain, Day of the Dead, Carnival, Ghosts, Cemeteries, and so on. You could choose between numerous mediums, although I suspect most folks did collage of some type.

I tried and tossed several ideas before I finally settled on the one below. This isn't the first image I tried for the idea either, the first one was too complex for the size parameters, which was 3" x 5". I had to whittle it down to it's most basic symbolism, a good lesson for little ol' detail oriented me.

First I'll show you the image, which may or may not make sense to you without the description that follows (and was included on it's own 3"X 5" card). It'll depend on if you know the mythology I used. But see how far you get first just looking at the image, I'm curious if it's at all effective. It's not at all the type of image I expected myself to design. Sorry for the tiny image:

Confused? Well, here's what I wrote to explain my card:

My card came from the juxtaposition of two unrelated events - the recent deaths of three local youth on a single day and a stray comment about the River Styx. I Googled “River Styx” and discovered that in some myths the Underworld is thought to have many rivers within it’s borders. Two rivers in particular caught my attention - the Lethe, from which you drank to forget one’s past life, and the Mnemosyne, who’s waters you drank if you wished to retain your memories upon reincarnation. It occurred to me that a death forces difficult choices upon both the living and the dead, between the pain of remembering and the balm of forgetting. I went to sleep dwelling on the grief of the teenagers in our community and woke up the next morning with this urban punk image of the river mythology that is more more in keeping with their contemporary world.