A Public Service Announcement! ;)

A Public Service Announcement! ;)

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Get Your Daily Dose of God or Goddess

My good friend and very talented comics artist (and artist in general) Erik A. Evensen has started a blog where he posts sketches of one deity per day. All culture's mythologies are on the table at Daily Deity. Evensen's graphic novel Gods of Asgard won a Xeric grant to help it see completion, and it is definitely a text I recommend for libraries and classrooms. It is well-researched and well-rendered.

I think visualization of interesting characters like gods and fairies and other creatures from mythology can help make ancient texts come alive for students. I used to ask my students to draw various pilgrims from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or to do a sketch of what the Beowulf monsters looked like to them. I also used to integrate fine art in my k-12 classes, letting students see how painters, etchers and sculptors had interpreted scenes from Shakespeare plays, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, etc.

I recommend bookmarking Daily Deity. It's a high-interest site for kids and adults and will always have a connection to multiple studies: religion, mythology, literature, history, to name a few. Even if the site eventually stops updating (the last entry as of this posting is April 17), it's a worthwhile resource.

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