I like white charcoal. Back when I first started experimenting with it, I had several ideas come to mind, most with white tigers, but also a few night scenes. This was one of them. The challenge in this drawing was not the animal as in most of my work, but rather the moon. I tried to get it as close as possible to the real thing without getting overly detailed. This paper has a patterned tooth that I find difficult to do detail work with.
The bird in the image is a raven. Ravens are very common in North America, and many native traditions believe the raven is the messenger of the spirit world. This raven is calling out a message for those who would listen. I liked the idea of the black bird silhouetted against the bright, full moon.
Prints and the original are available.
2 comments:
Back when I was pagan-ish, I put a lot of store into portents from ravens and crows. There's always a lot of crows here in Toronto, and I spent many hours as a teenager alone with my dog in a park near where we grew up watching crows in the trees above.
They are so marvelously clever, and this brilliant piece of yours reminds me so much of artwork I tried (not anywhere nearly as successfully) to produce at that time.
I just hadda give you a blog award.
Thanks so much, Glendon. I guess I come from a similar place. I've been reading a lot about shamanism and animal guides which really resonate with me.
We have both ravens and crows here, though there are more ravens around my house. I've found solid black animals to be difficult to draw, and figured I had to do better than the ink one from a while back.
And thank you for the award! I wrote a comment on your post.
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