Death, and Other Beautiful Things

It's been an interesting couple of weeks.  I've been thinking a lot about death and acceptance of the inevitable, and it definitely shows in what I've been doodling.  Which is not to say that I'm in a particularly dark or depressing place (insofar as death goes, anyway)- just... contemplative.  I've also been listening to Hayden Calnin's Cut Love Pt 1 on repeat.  Soooo...

I'm going to put these up slightly out of order, for the sole purpose of making sure the preview photo is a decent one.  Ah, vanity.  One of my many, many flaws.

Why Do You Hide

Although this is, to me, kind of a sad piece (the sketch sprang from sad- although not death-related- musings), it was also fun to work on.  Because hair.  And rainbows.  And getting highly pigmented lines with my watercolor.  I kept meaning to go back in and add shadows with gray, and maybe  I still will, but at the time I needed to let go and move on.

To a super cute baby!

...and by move on, I mean I was hanging out at Boozeday and there was a super cute baby there that needed to be sketched.  Now let's back up a bit to the second:

We had a date night!  I wore a swanky dress!

Aaaaand back (to the future!) again to the seventh:

Ireland-ISH

I was feeling particularly uninspired, so I checked my table and saw that it was monochrome British Isles Landscape day!  Which I started, and then forgot I was doing monochrome so the sky is blue but that's okay.  I like the sky.

Purely Ridiculous

You may be asking yourself, "What the bloody hell is happening here?" and frankly, Dear Reader, I don't blame you.  Because there is a narrow segment of the population to whom this bit of nonsense might appeal/even make sense to, and that is the place in the Venn Diagram of Fandom wherein Fans of Elfquest intersect with Fans of Watership Down.  I doodled and painted this (over the eighth, ninth, and tenth) in response to a conversation with said people (ie my people).  It's two of the protagonists of Elfquest, Cutter and Skywise, done up as rabbits.  I regret nothing.

Speaking of Watership Down (aka my favorite prose novel)...

"What is, is what must be."

I've been dwelling a lot on death, and when one thinks about Death when one is also thinking about Watership Down, one naturally thinks of the rabbits' manifestation of Death- the Black Rabbit of Inle.  And knowing that black is meant to be a scary color, an absence-of-light sort of color, just as death is mean to be scary, an absence-of-life, but knowing also that black can be the presence of all-color... well, that lead down the rabbit hole (sorry not sorry) of making a Black Rabbit with rainbows glinting through his fur.  Which lead to the three days worth of experimentation you see on this page.

Which, in turn, leads us to today, wherein I was doing more Thinking About Death, but this time in terms of an entirely different Fandom: Harry Potter.

Gentle Creature

I love the whole concept of thestrals: creatures that can only be seen by those who have witnessed and gained an emotional understanding of death.  Poor, scary-looking things: I would pet one, if I could.

Which brings me, once again, up to date with my endeavor.  For now.

Things are getting pretty intense with my studies: I've done well enough that they've allowed me to bump up the date of my test, so now it's less than a week away.  Eek!  I'm definitely ready to be done with this portion, however: this entire process has really been laying some of my uglier flaws (arrogance, impatience, ease of distraction, temper) bare to the fire, only to crack a hammer down on them, repeatedly.  Here's hoping I can allow myself to be shaped appropriately.