Mayan Glyphing Party

This past Wednesday I had the opportunity with Mike and others not from our group to travel back in time and get our hands dirty with the beautiful Mayan glyph writing system. 

First we chose a simple sentence and our translational expert, Mike, headed the effort of converting this into the elegant pictorial Mayan language. Truth be told we actually selected the sentence more from Mayan originally than anything else. The syntax and flow of the Mayan language is so different from English that it was necessary to start with Mayan in a way. What I mean by this is that we chose a sentence (in English) that made sense in Mayan and made sense grammatically (basically) but did not make sense colloquially in English. 

blow drying the soy sauce stain coat

Meanwhile we prepared our chosen medium of Balsa wood. We chose the fragile Balsa wood because of its paper like qualities made to represent the bark paper the Ancient Mayans inked on.  We decided to replicate the bark paper and ink rather than the more iconic carving on stone we usually think of when Mayans come to mind for two main reasons. One: the sentence we chose was simple and typical to the Ancient Mayan language. It was of no grand importance or very extravagant and thus not worthy of carving onto stone. Mayans usually reserved the exhaustive carving process to more important historical, cultural or religious items. We also had a fun time staining the wood to look more aged and authentic with soy sauce and drying it with my sisters hair dryer!

me working on the rough draft that we didn't wind up using

one of our failed attempts, the fresh soy
sauce just did not accept the ink 

After the careful sentence selection and material process was over we sketched it out in pencil. From there the creative expert (yours truly) went to work copying it over to our selected medium. The process started by arranging the glyphs in Adobe Photoshop so that I could best replicate them from a perfect source rather than a sketch. We made a stencil out of the print out and transferred an outline onto the balsa wood so I wouldn't be "free handing it" with my brush. The result was a faint outline which I traced over. We chose to write on the balsa wood using a "brush indian ink pen" made from natural ink sources to mimic the natural ink the Ancient Mayans would have used. After a couple of failed attempt, mostly because we didn't allow the soy sauce stain base coat to dry enough (thats when we broke out the hair dryer) before we applied the ink. I learned that even with the faint outline to work with it was very intricate and difficult. I know that doing this on a stone medium would be even harder. I have no idea how the Ancient Mayans adapted to the stone because the glyphs contain intricate and very curvy designs that, to me, wouldn't be suitable for stone. 

I really enjoyed this assignment. I think that the single most important thing I learned was problem solving. I deal with problem solving on a daily basis from my 2D Design class. After all art is about creative problem solving. The difference here was working together as a cohesive group unit in order to problem solve together. No longer could I just think of an idea to solve it but now I had to think of it and then communicate this knowledge to the others in your group and then decide together. This is all about sharpening and honing my knowledge skills in real life problem solving situations. Collaboration and creative problem solving are important learning strategies to know as part of being an integral personality in our society. In the end I liked having a hands on way to learn about history, share and communicate this newfound knowledge in a creative  format all the while developing new knowledge skills as we creatively problem solved and collaborated.