Ziggetai - Veil Of The Gods

Inspiration.

Kasamatsu Shiro

"Night Rain at Shinobazu Pond", 1938.

Woodblock Print

Mahjuti

Veil of the Gods features a magical system based on the ideas of Austin Osman Spare- a well-known 20th century artist and all round weirdo. He played with ancient and medieval ideas of magic especially the Norse magical tradition of Galdr. At a young age he came up with his own system based on graphics to empower his spells. He called these graphics sigils. I’ve developed his ideas much further for the storyline of Veil of the Gods. I call the symbolic designs glyphs rather than sigils and I’ve named the system of magic in Veil of the Gods- Mahjuti. Here’s one of the Hyper-Glyphs that feature in the coming chapters.

Inspiration.

Still watching this youtube channel about what I can only describe as "Dark Classical art" and this one absolutely floored me because I was unaware of it and I want to share it because it changes my perspective on this artist completely.

You might be aware of Louis Wain. If not by name then by his art. He's the artist behind that series of cat drawings that slowly became more and more abstract and bizarre.

This series of paintings of cats are often labelled as a visual representation of Wain's deteriorating mental illness and schizophrenia. Even more so often labelled as "a tragic display of a painter's failing battle with schizophrenia."

The paintings look like this and were painted around the very early 1900s.

Ok got all that?

So here's the thing.

Although Wain did suffer from a mental illness that was strong enough for him to be institutionalized, his mental illness was never diagnosed with clear certainty. Although "Schizophrenia" is so heavily applied to him based purely on how his series of paintings LOOK, despite actual specialists widely disputing this. On top of this, although he did paint the kaleidoscope cat portraits during this time, it was not the only things he painted, and he was quite capable of painting "normal" pictures of cats.

The Kaleidoscope Cat portraits are more images of him experimenting with colour and shapes, something the Smithsonian themselves state on their website.

Wain had actually made his entire living painting whimsical images of cats, often for product adverts, before he was incarcerated and was actually a very beloved artist at the time. When his friends learned of his incarceration, they started a collection of donation money to help transfer Wain to the Bethlam Royal Hospital instead, one of the best mental health facilities of the time. Even the Prime Minster of the time donated, and they raised a large amount of money across England to help him.

4 years later, Wain drew this as his final image which he released publicly

I knew all about "the Schizophrenic cat Guy" but he had always been presented to me as some tragic case of an artist going mad and his skills and work unraveling as he went insane.

Which is why I wanted to share this information which was new to me. And because I think it's important.

Inspiration.

Hasui Kawase (Japan, 1883 - 1957) 

Shinkawa Riverside, Handa, Bishu 1935

Woodblock Print.

Aware. Art by ATLOE (Ana Priscila Rodriguez)

So, I've been working on some animations today for Veil of the Gods. The idea is that the graphic novel will be available as a motion graphic book for iPad and Kindle reader. So these short animations will eventually be incorporated into the story. Yes, I'll still do static e-book versions and print versions but this is the direction I really want to be headed in.

The music I created for Veil of the Gods has been a wonderful journey in itself. You know, the long term plan is to transform the graphic novel into an interactive experience and an online game. So the music is very important. The track we used on the first two promo videos wasn’t the one I’d originally planned to include. This melody came to me in a daydream while I was trying to figure out a problem with a font. I picked up the low D whistle and the melody just burst out. I hadn’t actually played that instrument for about a year so I was really surprised. It was like the flute was just aching to be played again. The whole track took only a few hours to orchestrate, record and mix. And I’m pretty happy with the result. Here’s the short version without the flute.