Drawing Norse Myth, Or The Animals, Anyway

So for my latest set of illustrations, I've been drawing cards for a Norse myth swap. I'm fascinated by the pairs of animals associated with the various gods in Norse myth.

Huginn and Muninn

Huginn and Muninn are Odin's ravens, whose names translate as "Thought" and "Memory." They fly out into the world and bring back news, so if you find yourself under observation by a raven or two, you might want to think about whether you've done anything to anger the gods.

Geri and Freki

Odin's wolves Geri and Freki both have names that translate as "Greedy," though the root of "freki" is "ravenous," so I like to call them Greedy and Ravenous.

Bygul and Trjgul

Norse literature has this very cool device called a "kenning" which is a sort of synonym or poetic word or phrase. "Ken" means something like "knowledge" or "understanding," so kennings are about naming some aspect of a thing. An example is "whale road," referring to the sea. Well, the cats that pull Frejya's chariot have names that are kennings. Bygul or "Bee-gold" and Trjgul or "Tree-gold" are kennings for "honey" and "amber." Coolest cat names ever.

Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr

Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr (Tooth-grinder and Tooth-gnasher) are Thor's chariot-pulling goats (Norse gods seems to enjoy the grandeur of chariots, or maybe it's a military power thing). I wanted to make them look a little crazy, like their names.

At some point I'm going to have to stop avoiding drawing people. Drawing people is not one of my strengths, which means I should be drawing *more* people to improve my skills.

Hey Diddle Diddle

Here are my latest tiny illustrations, finished and about to be sent off for swapping.

Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle

The cow jumped over the moon

The little dog laughed to see such sport

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Though apparently what I have painted is not a dish, but a bowl. I never really thought about it until now, but I suppose that a dish and a bowl really are two different things. Similar, yes, but a dish is shallower. But not quite as shallow as a saucer.

Also, it looks like I really need to figure out how to shade things that have no texture, like ceramic dishes and spoons. My quick, messy hatching is just not looking good.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll post the Norse myth illos, and after that I hope to get back to some book binding projects.

Nursery Rhyme and Myth

Just so you don't think I'm getting lazy (hah!), here's my most recent batch of tiny art in inked-but-not-coloured stage. (And for those of you here for bookbinding rather than illustration, don't worry, I'll have plenty of book stuff to post very soon).

The top four are from the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle," but with the twist that the main actors are all fairies (hence the wings). The idea came from an ATC swap in which the participants would illustrate fairy tales or nursery rhymes but populate them with actual fairies (if you've studied folklore at all, you'll know that fairy tales often have no fairies to speak of in them).

The bottom four images are not simply pairs of animals, they're pairs of animals from Norse mythology. Odin's ravens are Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory), and his wolves are Geri and Freki (Greedy and Covetous; though both names translate as "greedy," the root of "freki" is "covetous"). The two cats are Frejya's Bygul and Trjgul (literally "bee gold" and "tree gold," or more simply Honey and Amber), and the crazy goats are Thor's Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr (Tooth-grinder and Tooth-gnasher); both the cats and the goats pull their deity's chariot.

I hope to get them all painted tonight, though that may be a bit ambitious. They need to go in the mail as soon as I can get them there, to make it to their swap host in time.

Nap Time

It's alive!

Yeah, so, not dead. At least not literally. I look a bit like a zombie:


But anyway. I seem to have survived the semester. I also seem to have grown a few muscles and lost some fat. Printmaking is hard work.

Speaking of which, here are some more work-in-progress photos of printing, this time relief printmaking.

Here is a reductive linocut all ready to print the final colour. There isn't much left of it now. Behind the block is a newsprint proof of the one colour all by itself.


If I back up a bit, you can see more of the area where I'm working.


And here's the block on the press, waiting for me to add paper:


And backing up a bit from the press . . .


The print, covered with a tympan and blanket, as it comes out the other side of the press. Unlike lithography or intaglio printing, relief printing requires very little pressure so it's really easy to crank the bed through the press.


Here's the print from the back. I've used a thin Japanese paper, so all the colours show through.


The finished print alongside the block I just printed from. This was the final run, of dark blue over the other colours.


And finally, the print itself. I've titled it Kitsune Kaze, which means "fox shadow" in Japanese (which I do not speak, but I know a few words).



---

So, what else have I been doing . . .

I signed up for some stuff, like Facebook, which I tend to ignore until someone posts something on my page or sends me a message.

On a whim, when I was supposed to be writing a paper, I signed up on Plenty of Fish, which I am not going to link to here. Much to my surprise, I met a few interesting people (in real life, even!). One signed up on a dare, and another in a fit of madness. Or something. Even so, I have come to the conclusion that dating sites are strange and disturbing places. And while I am, at times, all for strange and disturbing, dating sites are really the wrong sort of strange and disturbing. Very, very wrong. Like old men with big mustaches and no beards who like country music wrong. Like men from Europe who proclaim you drive them crazy in obviously not first-language English wrong (not that not having English as a first language is itself wrong, that's silly). Even guys who, when you tell them that colour, size and shape are not important, tell you to spare them your liberal nonsense and inform you that skin colour is how we know our own kind wrong. But I'm sure these things are great for some people. For me, I'll be giving my real email to a select few people (well, one of my real emails, anyway) and getting the hell out of there.

I suppose there is more, but I should sleep before I have to get up for work and I still have a few people (non dating site people) to email before that. Probably, due to the hols, it'll be less than a month before I update again. Until then, here is an amusing picture of Poe:

Cats!

Wait, three posts in one day?! Indeed. I found these photos on my digital camera when I was loading the little book ones for the last post, and I had to share them. You'd think the cats were content or something.


Bast really likes warm, fresh laundry.


Poe's not really that fat, but he's big and tends to spread out sideways when he lays down.