Autumn Arrives

Moonrise over fields, September 2012

Illustrations and illuminations. It's good to celebrate the turning of the Yearwheel. Mabon is the Autumn Equinox, in the old religion on the old calendar. Continuing with explorations of art-making on my digital devices, creating digital paintings and illustrations, and panoramic photo-montages.


Mabon Blessings 2012

Last year I gathered leaves falling from the trees out back in a wicker basket and did a photo shoot with them. This year I took one of these images and painted over it on my iPad, to make this illustration for celebrating the equinox.

I also used some clip art found on the Interweb to make this illustrated poem for the autumn equinox. Fires and memory. Burning piles of fallen leaves. The harvest moon. Cold nights, clear days. All those things that mean autumn in the temperate zones.



Then I went back to my original illustration and made some typographic art from it.



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Autumn is arriving early this year. It's been an extraordinary year for weather, with a drought and a summer full of record heat, and this fall all the leaves are turning a full month early.



The fields are already harvested; due to the strange summer weather the corn crop was stunted and unhealthy, and partially failed, never growing very tall except in some scattered fields. Now are already brown, or plowed, the hay mown and gathered, and everything ready for winter.



The maple trees are already turning bright colors, although some other species are holding on to their green. Until the dryness in the air turns them directly to brown, with no moments of splendor. The fall colors are already half-over though they've barely begun.