Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

 A few days of essential family business later, and I was able to return to the question of space and placement of visual components in the text over the weekend. I've now inked up and digitized all of the original sketches and visual ideas I had for possible wood and stone carvings. Below are a few of them, some turned into border and banner designs, making nearly 20 in all (including cleaned-up versions of the designs used in the stone carvings).  What's quite nteresting is the lack of several notable characters or character-types - no humans are depicted (apart from Gerthild, who is a bit of a special case). This might have been simply due to my interest in figuring out, and representing, the unfamiliar - i.e., the genuine Others - who appear in the story: most readers could visualise what a wizard or a king might look like, but nobody has ever seen, until now, a depiction of a Rockcat or Ulfish person. Only 4 of the 6 (prime) deities have (so far) been drawn, although the

 Today's tutorial went well, focusing mainly on space - both physical and visual, in the 'museum'/exhibition layout, and in the text itself, which is now in the final editing and presentation stage. We discussed the nature of traditional museums and how they tend to put the visitor through a planned timeline of experience - navigating different places and spaces - circular and/or linear. This came back to my sketchy idea of enforcing some kind of cyclical physicality upon the visitor to my space - bringing them back to the beginning (cf. the ouroborus snake design, again). Seeing strong examples of what can be done with art books and layout had influenced my thoughts on using more white space in the book/text (and reflecting this in the physical museum layout) - by adding blank pages, or creating extra spaces between lines and words at crucial points in the narrative, and interpolating the drawings of characters not as illustrations but as 'break points', for exampl

 Trying to figure out exactly how the finished, printed book will look with very little actual time remaining (I reckon I'll need at least 3 weeks to allow for the printers getting the job done and delivered, depending upon 'the situation' out there), so this evening I cleaned up a couple of the character designs into .eps image format so they can be resized to any scale. The 'marching band' of Ulfhednar border design and the Gifli character turned out quite nicely:  I'm not sure how much of this kind of thing I want to use - or how I could use it - as one of the plans at the outset was to produce visual work with physical and material qualities in order to get away from any form of 'illustration'. Besides, there's plenty of great artists out there who can do this kind of Celtic design work ten times better than me with beautiful knotwork and so on, but what I can bring to the visuals is a certain individuality, I reckon.  But I did always see the Ul