13. chalk it up to being a total dork
I was playing around with night-for-day shooting, as well as composed photo-illustrations. There's actually a sketch for this, but I wanted to try to create it for a camera instead of painting it.
Okay, let's set the scene. I'm kind of a photography dork, even though I'm a little blurry on the line between photoshop and reality-- I think of the camera like a cool sampling brush, but cheat-to-win is my motto for both exposure and color, not to mention composition. So these are all basically raw material for that final image up top. Still! Share in the fun and excitement of chalking a summoning circle in the park at 3am, all the time keeping a VERY wary eye out for the police neighbors! (I am so frigging glad it is not actually a pentagram, you have now idea. Mostly because that would be EVEN HARDER to explain in the morning.) I used to do a lot of hit-and-run-art (er, sometimes it is called graffiti. BUT IT WAS COOL ART, OKAY), so perhaps I was a little jumpier than I needed to be-- I mean, if someone demanded that I explain myself, I could just say that it was a kid's game that I was, uh, practicing, by myself. With daggers. And candles. And great big stupid dreamcatchers. At 3am.
I love these strips of cement, because they are out in the middle of a pile of grass and look exactly like bout strips for fencing, which feels somehow comforting!
OM NOM NOM NOM NECTARINES FEVER FRUIT!!
Details of the talismans and charms! Turns out that I have a BUCKET of them in my closet (wut.) that was just waiting to be poured out onto the cement. Srzly. Like about 10 lbs worth of Interesting and Sparklie Things, some jewelry, some piece of dead animal, some both. I am uncertain whether to be proud or embarrassed by this insight into my hoarding tendencies.
Holy crap this is a huge post. Anyway, discussion and doodles! From the description in the book, this is the design I came up with for a summoning circle that could be quickly and efficently chalked/cut with a piece of string and a writing impliment:
Anyone out there have cool alternative designs?
(* I'm also reading the Bartimaeus Trilogy right now, in which there is a lot of summoning going on. I have a feeling that those pentacles get much more involved-- has anyone drawn those?)