Athena

Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week to you. I hope you're having a nice week so far.

I've been working on a travel journal from my trip to Greece, and I have a page that works not only in my journal, but also for Valerie's Geometric Forms challenge at Art Journal Journey.

You can see squares, circles and a few other geometric shapes on my page. 

Athena is the ancient Greek goddess who is associated with the city of Athens. The Parthenon on the Acropolis is dedicated to her.  That's why I added the various columns to my page (even though they don't all look  like the columns on the Parthenon). 

She is often seen carrying a sword and shield, and although I have no swords, the circular immigration stamped images refer to the shield. One item she is connected to are olive trees, and even though I didn't add any  olive trees on my  page, I do have some olive branches surrounding some of circled stamped immigration images as well as the ancient face image.  She is also associated with owls, and so I have  stamped a few on my page.  One other thing she is associated with are snakes, and if you look carefully at her sleeve, you can see that it is edged with at least 1 snake 

I cut that Athena image from a postcard I bought at the Acropolis Museum. This statue was memorable, but sadly no photos were allowed in the area where I saw it. I had already been told once not to take any photos ( because I didn't see the sign that said that), and to avoid another angry sounding order, I bought the postcard instead. 

Athena's father was Zeus, and the story goes she was born from his forehead. I saw online that she takes her name from the city of Athens, but I also read that it used to be believed that the city took that name from her. According to Mia, who is a native, she says that Athens is named after Athena, and she knows that better than me. 😏

To make my page I used graph style craft paper as well as black card stock. The columns are an older Cottage Cutz die, and the gold crown border is another oldie from Cheery Lynn. I stamped images from AALL & Create and Judikins as well as the big owl that is a very old Ornatum stamp.  I finished by spraying my page with a bit of gold mica spray.

For those of you sick of Athens photos, I am just about ready to move on to other's from my trip, but first, here's a few more assorted Athens photos to wrap up my post.

These next 2 photos are a few items excavated while a subway tunnel was being built.

My 2 traveling companions were discussing the Greek alphabet, which we all more or less knew from our science backgrounds. Yet some of the lower case letters were not as easily recognized, and it drew attention at the subway exit sign.

Roman arches beneath the Acropolis

 as well as seats in an old amphitheater. 

This is a cool shadow.

And I love seeing images carved into stone like this Greek writing. There are 2 more examples further down in this post.

The sun was hitting this Roman columns just right.

Another walkway I was impressed with.

Hadrian's library, another Roman ruin in Greece.

And they had an interesting exhibit in the Acropolis Museum about the colors used in ancient Greek art/ statues.

This could be a page for Valerie's Geomtric Forms challenge at AJJ, but it actually some ancient Greek coins unearthed at the Acropolis.

And finally, the view from our lunch at the Acropolis Museum cafe. We decided it was nice so we'd eat outside. If you look carefully you can see the same statue of Athena  that is on my page on the building on the lower left. Well she is on the museum sign hanging on the building. 

Have a great day!