Athena’s Gateway

Athena is the Greek Goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law, justice, mathematics, strength, war, the arts, crafts, and skill. She’s quite busy, all things considered. Unlike Athena, I’ve had a lovely lazy May Day today. I wrote my Wordle this morning, and then started the above creation, left it for a while, and came back to it this evening to finish it off. The lazy bit was the time in between. It was glorious, I don’t mind saying. I love a good lazy day, I do. Does wonders for Feeling Good!

I also like being creative, so I gave myself a creative sandwich day today – creative burst on either side of being lazy. Hehehe!

I normally post this kind of post over on my ‘Art Blog’ (that makes me laugh whenever I use that term, but that is what Splodge and Splatter is meant to be all about – creations and stuff!) and then, on occasions, use the image created for inspiration for posts here on Beyond the Sphere. As I’m concentrating on trying to reach my blogging target of 2,000 posts by New Year’s Eve on this blog, my other blogs have taken something of a back seat for now… although I shall continue to post on them as and when.

Now, this post. And this image.

I wanted to go for a Garden on Mount Olympus type feel, so the beginnings of this post actually took place yesterday when I took several photos of the sky. I couldn’t resist the contrast of the pure white clouds and clear blue sky, so whipped out my mobile phone and took a snap or two. I chose one of the photos to use as the background here.

The rest of the picture is made up merely of random shapes in PowerPoint. I wanted to go for a kind of marble-effect structure, so joined together a few rectangles, bevelled them and added a 3D effect to them . The leaves came next, some made up out of the ‘official’ pointy-circle shape (that’s the technical name for it – around here, anyway – PowerPoint calls it a Teardrop!), and others just by creating a wobbly shape via the mouse. I used the gradient fill option for all, and quite liked how things turned out. The yellow flowers were created the same way, and the grass is just made up of small versions of the long-leaved plants.

When I put everything together, I felt the image needed just one more thing to finish it off, so I used an overlay of another image I created the other day, and made it really transparent, so it added a little magical glow to the image. That’s how I see it anyway. And finally, I created a little TOM emblem to use on these PowerPoint creations instead of my usual signature.

Athena’s Gateway is now complete. I wonder where my journey around Mount Olympus will take me to next? Only time will tell!