Pysanky in conte crayon and metallic graphite pencils

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is egg. And I see it's been over a month since I did an IF. No particular reason, really. I've just been mostly puttering lately, and haven't come up with much that I wanted to go to the trouble of scanning and posting.

This week's doodle features a part of my heritage that I know almost nothing about.

My grandfather was Ukrainian (well, Ukrainian-Canadian), but he died long before I was ever thought of. All I really know about my Ukrainian side is that my grandfather made his own pyroghies, but I don't even know if he pronounced it pyroghies, pyrohies, or varenyky.

And these aren't pyroghies anyway.

The pysanka (pysanky, plural) is the decorated egg you find as part of the Ukrainian Easter celebration. It's done using a wax-resist or batik-style method: you draw wax lines on a raw egg for the white part of the design, dip the egg into your first (usually, lightest) colour, draw more lines to add to the design, and repeat with as many dyes as you're planning to use. Remove the wax with a candle or a brief dip in hot water, and you end up with an extremely intricately decorated egg. Traditionally, each family had its own designs that were handed down from mother to daughter. There's lots of info out there if you're interested in more details, or here's instructions on how to do it yourself.

I'd love to try it, even though with my self-flagellating personality it would probably be an exercise in start again... start again again...and start again...

Anyway. A little ways north of me there are plenty of settlements that celebrate Ukrainian founding and Ukrainian heritage, even to the point of building the world's largest pysanka. Given that and the current holiday, I thought that it was more than appropriate for the prompt.

Midas Has... in soluble graphite

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is whisper. I seem to be stuck in mythology with IF entries lately, but what can ya do?

This one comes from Greek mythology again. Midas (yep, he of the golden touch) became a follower of Pan after accidentally turning his daughter to gold. At one point Pan challenged Apollo to a music contest. Apollo was judged to have won, but Midas fervently sided with Pan. Apollo scoffed that he must have ass's ears to think that, and gave him some as a punishment.

Midas was mortified and hid his ears under a turban so no one would know. He charged his wife (in some versions his barber, but I figured that I may as well stick with my series of inexplicably featureless females) never to tell a soul. The secret ate at her to the point where she nearly went mad, and in desperation she dug a hole and whispered the secret into it. Unfortunately for both her and Midas, reeds later grew on the soil covering the hole, and every time the wind blew over them they whispered Midas has ass's ears over the land.

Poor Midas never had much mythological luck.

As usual (so usual that I don't know why I bother to say it anymore), the scanner's done away with most of the wash. There's enough there to give the idea, though. Oh, and if anyone's wondering, this particular graphite is Derwent Graphitint. Limited colours, but at least it means that I'm not doing everything in greys when I'm doing the soluble graphite thing.

The scanner would probably love it if I'd stop doing the soluble graphite thing at all...

Tiamat in pen & ink and soluble graphite

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is storm.

Tiamat is... well, my knowledge of Babylonian mythology is sketchy at best, so I'll leave you to look her up for yourself this time. To be honest, I just wanted a sea goddess.

I don't know why I'm doing goddesses lately. I'm not usually a goddessy person.

The scanner killed this one as usual, but I was expecting it. Maybe I'll start signing my posted work "D.O. & Scanner". It's pretty much deserving a co-credit by this point. Anyway, please just do me the favour of assuming that there is actually a bit of sublteness (and shading, even) in the original. My co-creator apparently didn't think that it was necessary.

Just for fun I put this through a couple of quick filters after giving up on the hope of making the above look anything like the original. She kind of looks cool this way, really. Maybe I just should have posted this and called it digital art.

Ah well.

Daphne in various watercolour pencils

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is myth. Kind of my thing, what with the Classics courses in university and all of the sky mythology I do at work.

The scanner kind of killed this one, by the way, but I was expecting it to considering the medium. Or, I guess, media, since Inktense is technically ink and everything else was more standard watercolour. Anyway, I just decided to roll with it today. You can use your imagination if you'd like to guess at what the original really looks like.

The story of Daphne is easily findable on the internet, but the brief version is that Eros (Cupid) was annoyed with Apollo for saying that his arrows couldn't affect anything, so he shot Apollo with a gold-tipped arrow (leading to amorousness) and the naiad Daphne with a lead-tipped arrow (leading to abhorrence of love). Apollo chased, Daphne fled, and when it became obvious that she couldn't outrun the god she begged her father, the river god Peneus, to help her. He changed her into a laurel tree, and Apollo, still being in love, made the laurel his sacred symbol.

My Daphne looks nothing like a laurel, of course. Ah well. Artistic licence.

Octopus in metallic pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is ocean, and that was just the excuse I needed (not like I needed an excuse anyway, but work with me here) to play a bit with the Derwent metallic water-soluble pencils I got for Christmas.

I'm pretty impressed that they scan so well, especially with my fussy scanner. I'll have to get myself some heavier black paper now so that I can play with washes. The paper you see here is only 60 lb and far too absorbent, so my first attempt at using these with a brush was... well, kind of pointless. I'll let you know what happens with more appropriate paper.

Incidentally, Wheat (my office mate. Long story on the internet nickname) and I are of the opinion -- very honest opinion -- that it's a darned good thing for the human race that octopods don't have very long lives. They're extremely intellegent, they're able to manipulate things, they can walk on land (don't believe me? Search for it. There are more than a few videos that prove it)... I'm not kidding when I say that if they lived longer we'd all have octopus overlords.

A good thing, or a bad thing? I haven't quite decided that part yet.

Kind of just a mixed media mess...

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is snow.

I hate snow.

No, really hate it.

I grew up with snow, I still live with (I was going to say in rather than with, but then you'd wonder if I lived in an igloo) snow, and I hate snow. I hate cleaning off my car after it's been snowing, I hate driving in snow, and the only reason I don't hate shovelling snow is that I live in an apartment building so I rarely have to worry about taking care of walkways. And as for white Christmases? I think that they lose their charm once you're past childhood. One of the best Christmases I've ever had, personally, was one we spent in Hawaii.

With no snow.

Not a fan of snow, did I mention?

So naturally a prompt like snow wasn't going to bring out warm fuzzy feelings in Yours Doodlingly. What it did bring out was my mess of a mixed media journal (I so want to put journal in quotes. This book is nothing like a journal. More like a disaster). What you're seeing, then, done in front of the television last night, is cut-paper snowflakes covered in gesso and a blue watercolour wash, traced in watercolour brush pen, and... um, I guess you could say accented with silver and purple spider writer ink.

Yep.

I guess snow gives me the blues...

Darwin's Finches in soluble graphite

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is explore. What you're seeing here is three quick sketches of what are popularly known as Darwin's Finches: "finches" from the Galapagos Islands that Darwin described after his trip around South America and Australia aboard the survey ship Beagle. The beak on my warbler-finch (the one on the left) is a bit too short because it was hard to judge from the reference photo I was using, and of course I didn't bother to do any further searching until I'd already finished the drawing. The other two finches are currently considered to be the same species, but the one on the right has developed a heavier body and beak and may one day become a new species.

That's the short and simplified version of that story, by the way. If you're interested in learning more, it should be easy enough to find if you google Geospiza fortis 5110. This post really isn't going to have much to do with Darwin's Finches and their importance to the development of the theory of evolution, believe it or not. It's more about the voyage.

And before I continue, I should note that as usual my scanner wasn't fond of the soluble graphite wash, so I've had to darken this a fair bit to show any detail.

I recently finished reading The Voyage of the Beagle, which is Darwin's account of his five years on the ship. He was serving as naturalist on a surveying trip, and in those days that meant you had to know a little bit about just about everything about the natural world (enough abouts in this sentence for everyone yet?), from geology to entomology. It was quite something to read this diary of a fairly young man (which, granted, since I was reading the second edition, was heavily influenced by the thoughts of the later, older man. Hmm. That makes it sound like Darwin invented time travel. Who knew?) exploring a world completely different from the England he'd grown up in. At times he's incredibly full of wonder and awe, at times he's dismissive, at times he goes on far too long about geology (I'm sorry. I just find it hard to get that interested in geology), and at times... well, he climbs an awful lot of hills and mountains. He must have driven his guides and servants nuts.

One thing that struck me very forcefully was the giant ball of contradiction that was Victorian science. There is this absolute admiration of the wonders of nature coupled with incredibly callous destruction. The standard operating procedure seemed to be see, admire, describe, shoot, describe dead thing.

There's a lot of dead things in The Voyage of the Beagle.

Now, before any of the more science-minded amongst you starts in on the importance of study specimens to the advancement of understanding, let me just say that I know. I have a zoology degree. I've handled many a dead thing. I know that it's almost impossible to fully understand anatomy without dissecting things, and I know the importance of study skins in the description and comparison of new species. It's not the death that bothered me so much; it's the scale. Where nowadays we might go out and collect one or two animals (or, increasingly and even better, their DNA), the Victorians were shooting braces at a time. As my officemate reminded me when I was describing all of this, there was a time where every field scientist's lab or office contained a well-used gun cabinet.

Considering what's since happened to some of the species that they were shooting in dozens, I'm glad that's not the way we explore the natural world anymore. The early science was important to take science to where it is now, but I hope we've learned that we can't continue to be so cavalier when dealing with the animals that we're studying.

Backing off from death for a moment, it's interesting to me that at first it wasn't the finches of the Galapagos that attracted Darwin's attention. That didn't happen until he got back to England and his collections were studied by other people. He was far more interested in a couple of species of... mockingbird, I think it was. A good lesson there, really. Sometimes you need others' eyes to help point you to the ideas that are truly important.

There are other things I could say about The Voyage of the Beagle -- the uncomfortable feeling a modern-day reader gets while hearing his very Victorian dismissal of many of the natives he meets comes to mind -- but I've already blathered long enough and blather's supposed to be for my other blog anyway. I'll just say, then, that if you have any sort of interest in early(ish) scientific exploration and the associated attitudes, the book's worth a flip-though.





Is it weird that I just gave a review for a nearly 170-old book? Probably. Welcome to my weird life, then.