Drawing Hero´s Journey

I have had the privilege of participating in many exciting series projects, but nothing beats the adventure in Mount Rugova in Kosovo.
The project was called Drawing for Life, and my role was to help the participants draw heroes who save the environment.
What I did not know at all when the course started, was that one of the area's greatest heroes was on the course.

The participants started by learning to draw the basics, in order to then be able to design their own heroes.

 

Pictured above are some of the 50 participants, who show how their heroes save the earth from the waste monster. The place to draw the workshop was high up in Mount Rugova, which can be seen in the background.

A mountain that my translator Fatos, seemed to have a very special relationship with.

Dime, who was one of the participants, made this cover and had to carry out his own drawing workshops in Kosovo and Macedonia. We started from the narrative model "Hero´s Journey", which in Swedish is called The Hero's Adventure. George Lucas was the first filmmaker to use the hero's adventure during the first Star Wars movie. It is based on common elements in hero myths from around the world.

During the break on the last day of the course, the interpreter Fatos mentioned that he recognized all the different moments that I had talked about, and that the participants had drawn, in his own life.

I soon learned more, including that he had saved the lives of perhaps thousands of lives, precisely in this mountain.

In 1999, this area was hit by a war and the Kosovo participants were able to tell one by one in detail about when they had to flee their city, even though they were only small children at the time.

The translator Fatos, who knew the mountain as his own pocket, had guided and taught them how to cope up in the wild mountain terrain. And thus escape the attacking soldiers.

After the break, the last day of the course, I brought up my discovery of the hero in the room. The course participant Granit got up spontaneously, after that several of the participants did the same thing, and in the end they all stood up and applauded the translator Fatos.

A few years after that, I visited Kosovo again, and my new Kosovo friends enthusiastically told me that they were looking, and thought they had found a lynx up in Mount Rugova. It was thought that lynx had become extinct, because they had not been seen for over 20 years.

Many superheroes have taken their "uniform" and powers from various animals, such as Hercules from a lion, Batman from a bat and Spiderman from a spider.

My twisted brain imagined that the people of Rugova's mountains had received their superpowers from the lynx, when they had to flee, hide and survive on the wild mountain.

In any case, they needed the special characteristics of the lynx to become "invisible" and to master all the dangers of the mountain.

On ERA's facebook group, you can see about their lynx discovery, and also see how the young people still go up to the mountains to get inspiration and knowledge for new heroic deeds for change.

Organizers for Drawing for life: ERA and Global Action Plan.

Here is more info about the project.

The picture represents a simplified overview picture for the Hero's adventure, which was made for the book Drawing heroes and monsters.

Youtube playlist about the hero's adventures.