Initial Research

I am focusing my project on Greek Mythology - but I want to focus mostly on the gods and stories to do with them and their characteristics. I chose to do this because Greek Mythology is such a broad subject with many different stories so I thought narrowing it down to one aspect would make the project more manageable.

There are a lot more Gods than I anticipated, almost everyone is a God in greek mythology - or a demi-god etc. So to narrow it down further I only focused my research on the 12 Olympians (&Hades) though I suspect it will need narrowing down past here as well or I'm going to get very stressed trying to make too many images.

Shown are a selection of my sketchbook pages, where I have compiled some visual research of the Gods. I'm not sure what I want my final pieces to be so rather than just focusing on the appearance of the characters themselves I researched symbolism to do with them as well. The images of the Gods themselves I drew from reference images of statues.

I'm somewhat interested in pattern, so turning the symbols into a repeat pattern might be a fun project to do!

I was still a little interested in trying to include space, and thought the colour schemes of the Gods could be based off the planets they align to, for example - Zeus as Jupiter, red and orange. However I soon dropped any space elements because I didn't want to overcomplicate my ideas, as this is a problem I often have with projects.

I think turning my research into these visual pages was a good plan as it gave me something in my sketchbook to look back on and refer to visually rather than just a chunk of writing on a blog I could forget about easily.

I have been gathering research from a variety of sources including www.theoi.com, a DK Eyewitness Companion on Mythology by Philip Wilkinson and Neil Philip and the Mythology of Greece and Rome by Arthur Cotterell