![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramSix pages into the new sketchbook and I’ve done nothing I feel like scanning and posting. Not the sketchbook’s fault; the Strathmore paper is giving me the excellent performance I expect from Strathmore. (Consider this a recommendation.)
I spent the day at Ground, mostly reading Exodus from the Long Sun, occasionally sketching, but not really getting into the groove. I need a cheap source of Art Nouveau inspirational reference material; Google image search isn’t quite doing it for me. (Hm, this page of doors would be pretty good if the images were larger.)
It’s odd; I came back from Arisia all revved for doing some art, and now I just can’t seem to get into that head-space.
I was thinking about terms for the undead, and considering the D&D monster, the wight. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but whoever named this creature (probably Gygax, his linguistic reach has always exceeded his grasp) should have done a little research. Wight is a Middle English word meaning person, or possibly creature. The undead creature that Tom Bombadil saves the hobbits from he calls “barrow wights”, which simply means grave men. Gygax (or whoever) clearly seized upon the unfamiliar word wight as a term for an undead creature, and assumed that barrow was just a way of saying what kind of wight it was, like there are hill giants and storm giants. It’s as if you wrote a story about some zombies haunting a tomb, and called them “tomb folk”, and someone unfamiliar with the word folk decided it meant zombie.
I spent the day at Ground, mostly reading Exodus from the Long Sun, occasionally sketching, but not really getting into the groove. I need a cheap source of Art Nouveau inspirational reference material; Google image search isn’t quite doing it for me. (Hm, this page of doors would be pretty good if the images were larger.)
It’s odd; I came back from Arisia all revved for doing some art, and now I just can’t seem to get into that head-space.
I was thinking about terms for the undead, and considering the D&D monster, the wight. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but whoever named this creature (probably Gygax, his linguistic reach has always exceeded his grasp) should have done a little research. Wight is a Middle English word meaning person, or possibly creature. The undead creature that Tom Bombadil saves the hobbits from he calls “barrow wights”, which simply means grave men. Gygax (or whoever) clearly seized upon the unfamiliar word wight as a term for an undead creature, and assumed that barrow was just a way of saying what kind of wight it was, like there are hill giants and storm giants. It’s as if you wrote a story about some zombies haunting a tomb, and called them “tomb folk”, and someone unfamiliar with the word folk decided it meant zombie.