Lord of the Silent

Amon-Re is the Lord of the Silent. Who is Amon-Re? He is the Ancient Egyptian god of the Sun, and a beautiful golden artifact found by the amazing Amelia Peabody Emerson in my most recently completed book.

I believe I have mentioned before that I am in love with the Amelia Peabody series written by Elizabeth Peters. I had started this series by listening to the audio books narrated by the fantastic voice talents of Barbara Rosenplat, but I had to switch to reading the books because Audible has a gap!

This post is mostly an update on what's going on in my life, as I have not been very consistent in my blogging (If you happen to have a twitter account, I've been slightly more consistent in getting tweets in...).

As I mentioned above, I just finished reading "Lord of the Silent" by Elizabeth Peters. It was a very enjoyable book, as they all have been thus far. I had the chance to finish this book because I read most of it in airports and in flight. I've recently started this thing while reading in which I write down words I come across that I either do not know the meaning of, or words that I am just curious of the dictionary's definition. In reading this book, I wrote down over 100 words that met the criteria I just mentioned, and I didn't even have my notebook with me for at least half the book! Here are some of the more entertaining words that I have had the chance to look up:

aggrandizement: to make great or great; to make appear great or greater: praise highly

picayune: something trivial, or little value; A Spanish half real peace formally current in the South.

surreptitious: done, made, or acquired by stealth

supercilious: cooly and patronizingly haughty

ungainly: lacking in smoothness or dexterity: clumsy; having an awkward appearance.

I'm happy to report that reading this series will be building up my vocabulary! You are probably curious as to why I was traveling, well, I just got back from a quick trip to Boulder, Colorado for a triathlon that Kambria competed in. It was a fun trip with the sisters; we got to see wonderful lightning storms, do some window shopping, eat bad Thai food, eat great Chinese street food, watch new shows, and see Kambria compete at a pretty large race! Kambria did well, though not as well as she would have liked. The most important part is that she qualified for another big triathlon at the end of the season. If you want to read more about her season, you should go visit her blog. She hasn't written about her Boulder Tri yet, but you can feel free to bug her about it!

I think this will be the end of my brief update. Coming up soon, I will write about my sister Devynn's Etsy store, and her self-taught glassworks business (she's making me an adorable pair of earrings!). You should check up on her store periodically, it's called Fallen Leaves Koi. Check her out on facebook and Twitter!

I will leave you with a picture of my newly acquired stickers. If you didn't know, I collect stickers to put on my sketchbooks (Cassandra does this too). I wanted to find a cool Colorado one, but didn't have the best of luck. These stickers are pretty cool though!

For the Love of Contests

One of my goals for this year is to participate in a contest each month. Contests are a wonderful way to give yourself a deadline, and push your limits to learn something new. Now that I am out of school, and  somewhere in between free-lance designer and employee for my parents' business, I find that I need to push myself more than I did when I was in school.

For the month of January, I failed miserably. I had intended to design a fabric for one of Spoonflower.com's weekly contests. If you have never had the opportunity to check out Spoonflower, I highly recommend doing so. They are a fantastic website that gives you the opportunity to design your own fabric and actually get it printed! There is also a wide range of beautiful designs available to chose from that other artists have already uploaded. My favorite part is the contests though, and at some point this year, I will enter one!

Because of my failure at making it into any contests for the month of January, I decided that I would just have to enter two contests in February. To my surprise, there is a wide range of contests on DeviantArt.com. I found two different fashion illustration contest groups to join, and designed something for each one. 

This dress was for the "Greek Mythology" theme for the "Fashion Illustrators" group.
My dress design is based on Heracles fighting the Hydra. If you want more of a description, go check it out on my Deviant Art account.

This dress design was for the "Ugly by Design" contest in the group "Catwalk Challenge" on DeviantArt.
There were several ugly patterns given for this contest, and the challenge was to use at least two in one design.  This was what came of my design, which I had to do all of the rendering on Photoshop to keep the patterns.

Back in January, I did some surfing on the web to see if I could find some design contests that required sewing and fashion shows and the like. I found a really cool one involving the "International Talent Support", which is located in Italy and has design labels that come to watch the show! I had to create a collection of 5 to 8 looks with a specific inspiration.

I have been quite obsessed with Ancient Egyptian Mythology lately, and after purchasing a book about it on my birthday, I found plenty of interesting topics to inspire a collection. I chose "the Book of Gates," which is a work that describes the passage of Ra (the sun god) through the Tuat (the Underworld). There are 12 divisions of the underworld, each with a gate and large serpent guarding it. Each of these serpents have a name, and in order for the deceased person to get to Amenti (sort of a heaven), they must have the names of the snakes to get through the gates. For Ra, he has to pass through all of the divisions to get through the other end. The 12 divisions represent the 12 hours of night, so when Ra emerges at the end, it is morning.

I designed a menswear collection inspired by the different divisions of the Tuat.

My collection for the ITS Fashion Show.

I mailed my package at the end of last week, and will hear in mid-April if I am a selected finalist. If I get in, that means I get to actually make all of these garments by July (when the actual show is), and the really awesome part is, ITS will fly me and my collection to Italy for the show! So send me all of your good energy so that I make it as a finalist!!

For next months contest, I am thinking I might try for a t-shirt design contest.

Anyone of my readers a crazy contest person like me?

Always the bad guy....

I finally got around to watching the new version of Clash of the Titans, and I was not impressed. I really wasn't expecting to be impressed, so it wasn't that big of a disappointment, but it was interesting how they changed things from the original plot. (The original plot I am referring to is the old 1981 version of Clash of the Titans, still not really based solely on Greek mythology.)

One of the most interesting changes of plot was the motive of Perseus to defeat the Kraken (the Kraken is Norse mythology... not Greek). Instead of wanting to save his love Andromeda, he wants to seek revenge for his family against Hades. Man versus the gods. Interesting.

There was a few things that particularly annoyed me about this movie (and many movies loosely based on Greek mythology).

One: Why do they always depict Greeks in Roman dress? The Roman toga and the Roman soldier's uniform was not that exciting. The mohawk on the helmet is probably what annoys me most! And don't even get me started on Perseus' buzz cut!

Two: Seriously, if some of these writers would actually look at the stories in Greek mythology, they would see how ridiculous and crazy they already are and just make a movie from that. I don't understand the need to mix the mythology of multiple cultures to create some new story.

Three: I know Hades is the god of Underworld, and associated with everything related to death, but is that a reason to hate on him?

One of the things I particularly like about Hades is the fact that he is one of the Greek gods that doesn't run around. He did trick Persephone into staying in the Underworld, but that was his wife and he didn't mess around with anyone else. Very unlike his brothers Poseidon and Zeus. Another thing I like about Hades is that he pretty much sticks to ruling the Underworld. He doesn't get mixed up in all of the silly things between the gods and man.

I think that another reason I don't buy into Hades being a bad guy is because I am kind of sick of the bad guy plot. In reality, there aren't really any real bad people, not like the sadistic bastards that we put as the antagonist in movies anyway. If someone is bad, there are reasons that person became that way, and I love movies that illustrate this. One of my favorite movies that sort of lacks the bad guy, is Princess Mononoke. It's an animated film by Hayao Miyazaki. Go see it if you haven't, it's great!!! :D

Any other comments on the movie or other bad guy topics?