April 2024 CASAN Fundraiser - Tarantis, A Reimagining - Part 2

Fantastic Geography: A Multimedia Exploration in Imagined Places: Post Four

I’m Bill Paine. Thank you for supporting CASAN and for taking an interest in my project. Today’s entry shows a method of transferring a sketch from notebook to map paper. I superimpose the city map that I’d like to simulate onto my sketch and size it using Photoshop. I then flip the image, print and trace using tracing paper. I then flip over the tracing paper on top of the map paper and retrace. Tomorrow, I’ll try drawing in ink on the map paper.

Tracing an enlarged sketched - mirrored
Tracing a map I made using Photoshop to put some city maps together

April Arts for Asylum Seekers - Fantastic Geography: Post Five

I know that I said something yesterday about starting to put ink to my map so far. I need to get more pencil drawing done on my map first. I’ll update the map later.

Instead, I’m going to talk about one of the festivals that the people of Tarantis and the region celebrate.

Sheep Racing Festival
In early spring, shepherds begin herding their sheep and goats from barns and pastures of the lowlands up into the foothills of the mountains - where the meadows are greening and flowering. Tarantis celebrates with an early spring festival. I’m pondering names for this festival and would welcome input from you all.

Some of the features of this early spring festival include:

Garlic and Dandelion Wine Food Festival. All around the city - especially in market squares and parks, people sell and present their dandelion (and other) wines, their baked goods, teas, and pastas - featuring garlic and early spring florals.

Big Sheep Race! Around the large festival amphitheater in the middle of Tarantis, the wide path surrounding it is prepared with grass sod. Neighborhoods of Tarantis choose a sheep and a rider to represent them in the race. There’s a parade of all of the sheep, their riders, and neighborhood celebrities and representatives wanders through the city - followed by the race. The race features all of the neighborhoods’ sheep and riders. The winners are crowned Regent of Tarantis! After the race, several area shepherds herd their herds of sheep into the city and out through the southeast gate for the sheep sheering competitions in the meadows to the south of the city. The shorn sheep are herded later to highland meadows for the summer months.

Actual horse race - Palio de Siena - in Siena in Italy

(There is also some mutton and lamb served at a festival cookout in the evening of that day. If this is upsetting to any of you, please feel free not to include this in your Tarantis festival. One can make many dishes with garlic and without meat)

The fleeces are gathered and distributed to the Knitting Guild. The Guild will make sweaters for the Tarantis Sweater Festival in the autumn.

April Arts for Asylum Seekers - Fantastic Geography: Post Six

Let’s take a look at our map so far and see what is featured there as far as I’ve drawn. I’m not a professional cartographer. I’d also like input on place names and (later) character names. I enjoy maps old and new and I enjoy drawing them. So I decided to complete in pencil and I’ll either ink and watercolor after a certain point - or I’ll scan into computer and use Illustrator or CorelDraw to color. I lean toward analog, but we'll see how things go.

Sketching
More sketching
Heavier line drawing

April Arts for Asylum Seekers - Fantastic Geography: Post Seven

I mentioned in one of these updates that I’m “reimagining” the City State of Tarantis. As I mentioned, I bought a set back in the early 80s called “The City State of Tarantis.” Some time, in the early 00’s, my cousin had found the cover of one of the books and some of my notes while moving. I thought it might be fun to revisit it and maybe play some D&D with relatives and friends. I found that an online digital book retailer was selling PDFs of the old set, so I bought it again.

What I found was interesting. The map itself was familiar, but I didn’t really recognize much of the lore in the books. There were all sorts of high muckety mucks, merchants, and descriptions of places and buildings - none of which I recognized. Although we used the map and some of the location information, we made up stuff that wasn’t in the books. We made up the stories and people and places within the city that WE wanted to interact with - and so the written Tarantis was not OUR Tarantis.

My cousin found just the cover and some maps of another Judges Guild city in some of his stuff while moving

So about six or eight years ago, I decided to create an homage to Tarantis based on what I remember about the adventures we had there. Honestly, I don’t remember a lot. One of the players has found an old notebook. I’ll be consulting with him soon about that - and maybe setting up a series of zoom calls with all of the players (the major game of this only had three of us, but my cousin and I also shared some adventures there, too.

So, my Tarantis will have very little similarity to the original. My map of the city will be based less on the original and will look a lot like Ancona, Italy and the coast near Newcastle in the UK (big fan of Vera, a mystery show on British TV). The culture and individual people will be inspired from a lot of other sources.

April Arts for Asylum Seekers - Fantastic Geography: Post Eight

I’m not finished with the regional map - but I’m eager to get to the city map. So here’s a start. By the way, I Was feeling a little overwhelmed over the weekend - digesting too much terrible news in large gulps was part of that. An image of a laughing child, in colorful clothes, colorful flowers and ribbons tied into their hair and clothes - riding on a sheep similarly decorated - riding through the streets of an ancient city - was an image that came into my head. It reminded my to seek out fun and beautiful imagery. I was reminded to fill the bird feeder and listen to the birds. Were they impatient or were they thankful? It was just helpful for me to dig out from things that were overwhelming.

(stole this from the internet - but this kind of image - except the child is having a laugh and is in colorful clown like costume

April Arts for Asylum Seekers - Fantastic Geography: Post Nine

In this post, I’d like to consider food and eating in Tarantis. We went out to lunch at one of our favorite restaurants yesterday. After lunch, I was cooking chili for my lunches this week and dinner. Some Tarantis food ideas came into my mind while cooking, but I’m not good at multitasking and did not write down these food ideas, sadly.

Tarantis is in a place on this fictional planet much like the northern mediterranean on planet earth. So, I’m thinking that we imagine having fresh fruits, olives, grapes, and wines, fish, and meats. I envision restaurants and cafe’s serving dishes with garlic, with olive oil, fresh herbs, local vegetables, meats, and fish.

One such dish might be a baked fish, drizzled with lemon, wild rice, fresh tomato, basil garlic pesto, some greens, and steamed fresh veg. Simple, light, and tasty. (Sorry - I write this an hour before lunch and now I’m hungry).

In the week to come, I hope to explore more closely in one neighborhood - focusing on that neighborhood and the people and culture there. Talk to you soon.

CASAN update - the fundraiser you sponsored is up to $14,650 after our goal of $10,000! Thank you!

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