Working on my Spelling

PID (Production in Development) Picture

 So I was cleaning my basement one day when I came across a glowing red pentagram on the floor. As soon as I lay my eyes upon its eerie light a booming, layered voice pierced into my mind, speaking in ancient tongues never before heard by mortals, singing incantations as old as the moon and sky. Well, that's awfully peculiar, I thought. Of course, I did as any character in any horror movie would do, and walked straight toward the danger with no prior planning, leaving only my instincts and common sense in my wake. In the center of the pentagram, I found a small tablet. I thought it looked cool, so I took it. This is the story of that tablet.

Sadly, there's a plot twist. I don't have a basement. I'll tell you what I do have, though: a global awareness of art making. I think it's kind of apparent, really; the Aztec dragon, the viking and Anglo-Saxon text and designs, and the phoenix (which is a Greek myth, and even though it is doubtful that the Greeks drew phoenixes the way I did, Myths and fables are still art methinks). This art circumnavigates the world. Essentially, I wondered, hmm, what is magical? The answers I came up with dragons, phoenixes, and runes. I think that's pretty accurate.

Another thing I have is the development art-making skills. Firstly, I finally learned how to color paper with tissue paper pigment without making it look like a mess of bleeding colors and blobs. I don't know how I learned that, it was like I just inexplicably became a color-things-with-tissue-paper-expert. Weird. Speaking of tissue paper coloring, I discovered a whole new medium while procrastinating from the painting portion of the painting. In my boredom and laziness, I decided it might be fun to ball up some tissue paper and dip it in a bowl of water to see if it explodes or something. Sadly, it did not. Happily, I squeezed the paper and out dropped some sort of magical colored liquid. I discovered that this liquid had virtually the same properties as watercolor paint. I used it to color some of the rhomboids, and it worked very nicely.

And at last, I have is risk-taking abilities. This complete tablet was only completed by me compounding tasks one by one upon each other. So I came home one day with a wonderful piece of cardboard covered in newspaper. My plan was to color the newspaper with tissue paper and water. I soon learned that newspaper + water = a no-no. I saw that the paper absorbed so much water that it couldn't hold the pigment. I panicked for about five minutes, but then I had a brilliant idea: "Of course! I'll just take some printer paper and some scissors and cut it into A MILLION TINY RHOMBOIDS AND PASTE THEM IN OVERLY INTRICATE LAYERS OF PATTERS OVER THE PLACES I WANT TO COLOR. Several hours of cutting and pasting the evil shapes ensued. When I was finally finished, I let out a sigh of relief. I also burned the remaining diamonds, but that's not important. What was important was coloring this paper.  That wasn't necessarily a risk, but a soon learned that tissue paper + a layer of glue = absolutely nothing. The pigment refused to even touch the layer of glue, let alone absorb into the paper under it. But I'd gone through all this effort to color the paper, so I was determined. I scratched through most of the layer of glue with my fingernails over the next hour; I had managed to remove about 60% of it. I began to color the paper regardless of the spots that I missed and I found that the patches of glue assembled in to the splotches that lacked any color. Believe it or not, I actually created an equation I used to color through these splotches: 15n = g, where n is the number of sheets of tissue paper it takes to color a non-gluey area and g is the number of sheets of tissue paper it takes to color a gluey area. Even using the equation however, several of the splotches refused to be colored. I ended up just painting over them, which brings me to my next point; painting. The first thing I painted was the colorful orbs on either side of the tablet. The only risk here was that I had no prior planning whatsoever and totally winged it. And as with most of the things that I totally wing, this ended up being my favorite part. Next, I added the animals decorating the longer sides. The phoenix was wonderful to paint and turned out rather nicely, but I was concerned that the dragon would to fit in with the rest of the painting. I thought the green, a color only present in the dragon, would look out of place. But it was the only color that fit with the rest of the dragon which I had already painted, and I couldn't exactly remove the dragon at this point. It looks alright, I think. Perhaps something blue would have turned out better. The final thing I did was write all of the words/the spell in ink. I did quite a bit of googling for this one, as I unfortunately am not fluent in Anglo-Saxon. But Anglo-Saxon was not my only idea for the language of the spell. My original thought was Akkadian (which amusingly spell-checks into 'Canadian'), which was too much work because the Akkadian language is apparently made by insane desert people with styli. One needs only to look at their cuneiform to be discouraged from writing their cuneiform. I also tested on another sheet of paper Tibetan, Chinese, Elvish, Hebrew, Persian, Latin, Minoan, old Gaelic, some languages that I made up, and some others. The result ended up being Anglo-Saxon interlaced with runes interlaced with a sentence from one of my own languages (The circle-thing at the top is, indeed, a sentence from a language I designed when I was supposed to be taking notes for American History). It was a risk even putting the words in at all, as I was afraid the ink might not mix with the rest of the painting or that it was unnecessary to begin with, but again, I think it turned out well.

And here I leave, hands stained with ink and covered with glue, mind weary from so many innovative ideas,
and burned to the ground from the fire in my heart which ignited when glue pigment collided (or rather, didn't) with glue. My only wish is that the Tablet's next heir is more prepared than I. Perhaps I shall keep it for an eternity, then. Or perhaps it has alternate plans.