Deer (and Antelope) Girls

I drew people! I avoid drawing people, but that's a bad habit I'm trying to break. These ones are mythological people, but people notheless. Oh, and if you're offended by naked boobs, you don't want to look at these.

Queen of the Forest

The Magician

Qi Lin

Antelope Woman

All of them are ATCs--2.5 by 3.5 inches, drawn with india ink and a crowquill nib pen, and coloured with watercolours. These ones are for my very first swap on Illustrated ATCs, a juried ATC and mail art swap site.

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.

Madness, Shapechanging, Art

The Journal of Mythic Arts Summer /Fall 2006 issue is now up at the Endicott Studio website, and my paper "The Artist as Shaman: Madness, Shapechanging and Art in Terri Winding's The Woodwife" is included. You can scroll down the page to find it (but be sure to look at the other wonderful stuff too), or if you must, skip straight to it here.

This was originally written as an assignment for a workshop/seminar I took at SUNY New Paltz in . . . 2003, maybe, or was it 2002? So it's really Heinz Insu Fenkl's fault that I wrote it in the first place. And, of course, Terri Windling's for writing a book that made me ramble on at such length. (The mistakes and the stupid things are all my own fault of course). The paper was first published in the Mythic Passages web journal.