Crow Bird Woman and Fox Woman Drawings

One of the prompts in the first week of January for the IG challenge I was participating in was to draw a mythical being. I decided to create one of my hybrid bird woman beings. I’ve done these here and there throughout the years. I really enjoy doing them as I love birds and I love myth and folklore. I have a really early memory of sitting in front of the shelf of folklore from around the world in the little library at my school in 1st grade and wanting to take them all home, but only being allowed to check out one. I devoured those books. I loved the stories and often the artwork that would be in those books were just so wonderful. And then there were the Narnia books that convinced me that there were portals to other worlds if I was just lucky enough to find one! Books and stories have always been so important to me.

I drew this in my journal and I think I’d like to return to it one day and do it properly and clean up all the smudges. One day….

I did however come back to this similar theme two weeks after and created a Fox Woman.

I’m actually getting a little obsessed right now with doing pencil drawings and then adding just a bit of color with gouache or watercolor. And also doing a more illustrative style. Having fun and being relaxed about it.

I am taking a bit of a break from studio work this month to work on some other projects. Also, I’m going to moving my studio soon to inside the house because I’m having issues with my feet not being able to warm up down in the studio/garage/basement and with my arthritis issues, they really start to hurt. I will have better light up in the house and my ventilation concerns will also be eased. So I’m in a bit of an in between this month. I still need to create for my own peace of mind, so I’ve been doing these small pencil/gouache/watercolor creations on my couch at night. I’ve even done a few more that I’ll hopefully find time to share here or you can see them on my IG page.

It’s actually refreshing to just create these little drawings/illustrations even though they are so different than what I usually do. Well, that’s probably why I’m enjoying them so much.

I was just listening to a great podcast that I recently found called Talking with Painters, episode 117 where the artist Julian Meagher said something like and I’m completely paraphrasing here, but this was the gist- You’ve got to paint for who you are. Not for anyone else and it helps you get to know yourself better and you become truer. If you want to paint hyper realistically because you get lost in the process, go for it. And if you want to paint more intuitively, go for that too. Don’t fight it. Painting is a mirror into who you are and can reflect things back to you.- I was on his website and he had a show where he had beautifully painted portraits hanging right next to minimalist abstract paintings and very pared down landscape horizon paintings.

I wonder what these mythical hybrid creatures that are coming out of me mirroring about myself. hmmmm…