Fire! in My Collage for LMAC #163

My collage for LMAC #163 represents a festival of fire.

I was stumped when I first saw @shaka's template photo. Hence my late post (I don't enter the contest).

@shaka's Template Photo

I don't know how the theme of fire occurred to me, but once it did I knew I would want to create a kind of festival. Fire holds profound significance for many cultures and religions. It can represent renewal and purification. The Aztecs took the notion of purification and renewal a bit far with a grotesque ritual called The Binding Up of the Years.

Xiuhtecuhtli, Aztec God of Fire

Credit: Simon Burchell (Own work). Used under CC 3.0 Unported license.

Every 52 years they would begin the process of renewal by putting out all fires, then starting a new one on the chest of a captive. From this fire they would relight all the other fires. The Aztecs associated fire with the sun. They believed that if they didn't perform the ritual, (which was also called the New Fire Ceremony) the sun would not return.

While many of us may not believe we need to light fires to recall the sun, it is a fact that fire is an essential part of nature's cycle. When forests burn, nutrients are returned to the soil quickly. From this enriched soil, new life may grow. Lightning is essential to this cycle.

Naturally occurring fires have been part of grassland ecology for hundreds of thousands of years. When fires do not occur naturally, humans start them as part of land management.

My Collage
The fire in my collage is a good fire. That's how I imagine it, and so the people rejoice. These dancing figures are more like sprites that are filled with frenzy as the intensity of the fire builds. The celebrants dance in front of a burning forest and the (headless) religious figure carries a torch to light the symbolic fire tree.

Here are a few of the stages I went through to get the final result. I stumbled along and then thought of making people out of the trees. I printed out a black and white copy of the template (no color in my printer). I tried to outline figures from two trees, uploaded that image to my computer and then tried to make digital figures out of it.

My first attempt at a collage featured only two dancers. I made several frames for a GIF but the result simply wasn't interesting. Here is one of the frames.

I went back to the drawing board, added shrubbery in the background, found @m1alsan's lovely fire tree and began to move things around.

It took a while to get the look I was going for (a controlled forest fire). Then I started adding celebrants, the torch and the spidery creatures. The torch is really a match (contributed to LIL by @quantumg). The spidery creatures are adapted from a plant (contributed to LIL by @yaziris). I used lighting effects from Gimp to make the tree flame and the fire in the background blaze.
Here is a still of how it looks without animation.

My collage is simple, yet I am indebted to friends in the LMAC community for essential elements in the GIF. Here are the elements I borrowed from the LMAC Image Gallery, LIL.:

The fire tree from
@m1alsan

The torch from
@quantumg

The torch bearer from
@muelli

The spidery creatures from
@yaziris

A photograph from Pixabay, contributed by geralt, provided the fiery background

LMAC and LIL

Making collages is a creative exercise and a learning experience. This week I learned about the Aztec fire ritual! Please check out our new contest, #164, just published today. Make a collage and join in the fun.

You can see that LIL, the LMAC Image Library, is an important part of my collage creating process. Everyone on Hive can contribute to the library and borrow from the library. Learn about the procedure here.

I wish all my readers peace and health.

Thank you for reading my blog
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