Hi loves!
I kept work up on on my “not fire” painting, and made elaborate measurements for beginning what I hope will be a fiery mandala over the top of it. It was not easy, because when I did the painting, I didn’t measure any damn thing. I just eyeballed it, so now I’m having to fake a few flames here and there, hoping it’s not too obvious it didn’t begin with carefully engineered circles.  And because I don’t own a huge circle-maker, I ended up using a couple of glass bowls, a plate, a pot lid and our extra large fruit bowl. Also got my new little skinny painting tips in the mail. So excited to start being able to “draw” with paint using those. 

Then I started, with some fear, to sketch on top of the paint those mandala-ish shapes, and added a couple of creatures to it, too. I want to put many creatures on it, both African and other-world. I looked up pictures of what trees might have looked like from prehistory, too. Sheesh. All this for what will probably look a lot like a cartoon.

Next day I worked on sketching more of the animals to incorporate into the mandala. Very important to me to include some people who’re now extinct, such as the black rhino, the atlas bear (he’s in the picture above, in a Roman tile mosaic), the quagga, the dodo, and the bubal hartebeest, at least, because on a beautiful imagined world, these would still be alive and thriving.  I want to honor their memories, even if it might not be entirely apparent that they are in this painting. At least I know, and if you’re reading this, you do, too.

I knew I was going to be camping this week and unable to paint among the pine trees, so I wanted to get as much done on the paintings as I could, and poured the background for the “Web” painting and for the “grassland”.

I stopped arting, though, to fiddle with the Ahzhvii Dictionary with Meggie. Which always leads to fiddling with the Encyclopedia, futzing with the Amiinu, and having to coordinate all that with the Book of the Darjadd.  Oh, what you people have to look forward to! We ended up laughing deliriously trying to figure out how we should spell all these damn alien words we are inventing with earthling letters. Is there something we can standardize? As we discovered after looking at the ridiculous nature of a bunch of the words on printed page, probably not, but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

And also, yes, we changed the name of the freaking PLANET THIS WHOLE SERIES IS ABOUT –  from Ahzhirit to Ahzhvii…

… holy galoshes, this changes everything (and I started changing everything), from the facebook web address to the website blog posts, our youtube page, not to mention going through two novels, 200 pages of encyclopedia, the dictionary, the book of Darjadd and all the short stories. Another deep, deep breath and dive on in. It’s not easy for us to change, and Meg has been using the name Ahzhirit since what, 2010? I have to train my fingers now to type this weird new thing. We’re practicing saying it out loud around the house over and over till we can get it mouth-straight.

Also continued scouring the iv’Azhvii alphabet/amiinu to re-create the dozens of names for the vocations of some very cool people coming up in a future novel that were already created, but now we need to make them iv’Ahzhvii instead of based in English.  Each letter in the alphabet/amiinu has it’s own symbolic meaning, so putting them together to form words that mean what the letters combine to mean is both kind of tedious, and a world of fun. And we’re also doing this for the names of every nation on this far away fantasy planet of ours.

I’m amused, too, to find that I’m beginning to use a few of these alien words in my real, earthling life! 

 

I’ll be out in the wilds of Colorado for a few days, so I’ll see you again next week!

Big love,
CB