Maya Codex
Before a trip to the Yucatán Peninsula, I bound an accordion-folded travel journal with a page for each day.
Overview
I folded a long sheet of watercolor paper into an accordion, the same binding structure the Maya used for their own bark-paper books, and added a pair of cover boards wrapped in paper I decorated myself. That gave me one blank page for every day of the trip. In the evenings and any spare downtime, I filled in that day's page with illustrations and Maya glyphs based on what we'd done.
In preparation for this, I did a lot of research into the Maya writing system and surviving codices. Only 4 survived the Spanish colonization, but they were enough to give me an idea of what my pages should look like. I found a compendium of glyphs and their meanings, and learned about the various date systems and base-20 numeric system. I'm a big history nerd so this was a fun excuse to hyper-fixate on a new ancient culture for a while.
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Front Cover: Thick paper decorated by me with sumi inks.
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First Page: The Maya calendar has multiple ways of writing dates. This is the longest and most formal, usually reserved for monumental stone inscriptions. This is the "long-count" of the date July 22, 2023, The first day of our trip.
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Left Page: The house we stayed in shown from the front and back, with glyphs "East" and "West" indicating the direction one would face to see that side. The birds are a few of the species we saw near the house, including a grackle that liked sipping from the pool.
Right Page: Most of the first part of the trip was spent swimming in either the ocean or the pool.
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Left Page: The glyph for "Sun" in the top-left corner, while the bulk of the page is dominated by Chaac, god of rain. He sits on a jaguar-skin throne denoting deity. Also present is the feathered serpent, Kukulkan who is also associated with storms. On this day of the trip, a huge storm rolled in.
Right Page: Glyphs for "pyramid," "ball court," and "monument" across the top, with prints made by stamps I carved out of erasers below. In the bottom middle, the glyph for "cenote." On this day we visited Chichen Itza and other ruins, then swam in a cenote.
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Left Page: Ab-Muzen-Cab, the descending god above a tree. He's the god of bees, among other things. The tree has the glyph for "tree" and the glyph for "bee." The bees around the tree are also stamps I carved. We toured ruins that included a temple to this god.
Right Page: The glyph for "bat" repeated across the top. A cave system filled with water we swam in takes the bulk of the page. Across the bottom, the glyph for "cenote" is flanked on either side by the glyphs for "fish."
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Final page: A line of glyphs down the left side read "July 29, 2023. Cenote water manifests Ach Puch (god of death), he of books, spouse." This is my attempt at writing out that my wife and I got Covid, which my mother in-law blames on the cenote water (She's terrified of water). On the right side of the page, the aforementioned Ach Puch breathes out Covid particles above a copy of a frog illustration I found in the Dresden Codex. Frogs are considered gatekeepers of Xibalba (the Maya underworld).
Memory Aid
On the back of the accordion I wrote out an English translation of each day's glyphs, plus a short summary of what we actually did. I won't have to go search for the meaning of the various glyphs when I look back at this, and it still fulfills its purpose as a journal of our trip.
Research
I knew I wouldn't have a ton of downtime, so I did a lot of research beforehand, learning about the numeric and writing systems. Then once we were there, I did some serious planning in my regular sketchbook before committing to a design in the actual book. I enjoy looking back at these process pages almost as much as the final product.
