First few sketches from the margins of my reference copy of the Divine Comedy with the first rough sketches for Dante and the first two page spreads on the left hand side. The lion, leopard and wolf are major elements for the first page spread along with the wood. I'll use visual imagery refered to in the poem even though I will have cut it out of the abridged rewritten poem. Thats just my way of making it a little richer, pictures being worth many words after all.

Its time to move onto Canto II and rewrite that next. It won't be long as most of it will be left out. Canto II is a conversation between Dante and Virgil about how the shade came to Dante's aid and references artistic muses and other things that won't make the final cut. I hope to do Canto II in one page spread with not more than 8-12 lines of the poem remaining.