While We’re Tidal

 and flexed on a full moon,
    It’d be a sure, sure shame not to

Recently I’ve been laughing to myself about all the different ways people nerd out. Like my brother attempting to build an electronic damage counter for Magic from scratch. I spent quite some time making a map of the fictional country Northfalen where Khali came from before joining up with the Outlanders. And typing out three pages of info about it! Or like Josh trying to convert Zombies into a fixed-length tabletop. Or Andreas, finished his PhD (at last!), relishing in the thought that now he has time to create his own programming language. Nerds are so great and so diverse. I’m proud to be one.

Now that I’m basically done futilely expanding Khali’s background, the creative inspiration has moved back to vector art. Here’s my latest piece.

I got the idea for it a long time ago when I found out that a group of skylarks is called an exaltation. That is the coolest animal group name ever! Except for maybe “a murder of crows”. Anyways, exaltation reminded me of exultation and I got a picture in my mind of a girl from the inland seeing the sea for the first time and just reveling in the vastness and freedom of it. Like the Emily Dickinson poem, “Exultation is the going of an inland soul to sea / Past the houses, past the headlands— / Into deep eternity.”

The symbolism is mostly in the colours. The girl is dressed in earthy tones to indicate that she’s been raised far from the shore on terra firma. The larks are the colour of the sea because they are a manifestation of the girl’s feelings towards it. (The slightly darker lark in the center is the girl’s “inland soul” going to sea.) The tree I originally had in black, which looked cool, but eventually changed it to the off-white to symbolize things of the land fading from the girl’s mind as she is presented with the eternal and beautiful sea.

My next project, if my energy stays here in the visual, will (probably) be a piece depicting Eve and serpent and apple.