One of my best friends is getting married in a week’s time. To help out with preparations, I was asked to put together a cover for the dziesmu grāmatas (song books) because my other best friend stated “Since you have better art skills…”

Why a song book? Because Latvians really love to sing. We don’t have “Song and Dance” festivals for nothing!

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to include a Latvian symbol or two no the cover. These symbols traditionally carry some sort of virtuous or mythological meaning behind them. For example a symbol could represent knowledge or fertility while another one could represent any of the pagan gods like Auseklis or Laima. This aspect of my heritage truly fascinates me since these symbols are still used these days on folk costumes, jewelry and even on Easter Eggs. Back when I went to Latvian School on Saturdays, we would have competitions around Easter time where we would bring in eggs that have been colored using primarily dry onion peels and spend a good portion of the day etching symbols on them. So I guess from that I’ve developed an addiction to geometric symbols? I mean, give me a sheet of graph paper and that’s the first thing I would doodle.

Hand drawn facsimiles from “Senču Raksti”

Using “Senču Raksti” by V. Klētnieks, I translated hand drawn symbols to a digital format. It started with the simpler symbols and gradually I got carried away by drawing the more difficult symbols and even adding in color and using other techniques. Praise to Snap to Grid in Illustrator!

Digital recreations of Latvian symbols

Ugly sweater version of Auseklis