A pair of Ukrainian Easter eggs I've made. My designs are not especially traditional and are instead inspired by old wood cut art. The first egg features a musician playing a bandura and the second has 4 pictures, fish, forest, wheat and mountains. The eggs are made using beeswax applied with a metal tool called a Kistka (heated via a candle or electricity) you draw on the egg wherever you want to preserve its current colour before putting it into a dye bath working from the lightest colours to the darkest. When you have finished you remove the wax using a candle a paper towel and a little patience. heating and wiping away. then you can blow out your egg by making a hole in its top and bottom, smashing the yolk with a needle and blowing. These eggs are a couple of years old but we've pulled them out for easter last weekend.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
In my Blue Star sketchbook serious art has been interrupted by two cartoon characters I came up with years ago that I drew for my university student newspaper. They're back! Adolescent silliness returns with the adventures of Hardball and Riley. There's a bit of allegory at work in this story, so it's not as infantile as it first seems. They are certainly fun and my main characters are very easy to draw. I do sometimes spend too much time on the background.
What's more comforting than a summer day with butterflies flitting and bumblebees tumbling amonst the flowers in the meadow? My husband felt that blue was most comforting for him. Me, I liked the salmon. The mandala is drawn in Spirality...which takes the designated "wedge" and repeats it around the circle. Colored in Photoshop (given there is a 20 min. time given for this challenge---otherwise, I would have colored it by hand).
I drew Blue again because he's fun to draw,im going to be drawing the other 3 again.I still don't know what names to give them though.They all have these phantom forms where they have no legs,this is the form they mostly use to cause nightmares.I made his eyes to be normal sized since he has a large mouth(all of them do) I drew them too big the first time I drew him.
As fun as it is, creating new OCS can be quite challenging especially if you don't have any names or personalities for them at all as well as not knowing what to do with them! Now then...They're called the shadow nuisances because I don't know what else to call them,they can be annoying to the peasant teenagers so,it fits.they are another race of shadow demons resembling phantoms (like Snidecious)so they're shadow phantom demons,they posses ghost like qualities too.all of them come in different sizes and shapes,they don't have noses or ears.having 5 fingers.all of them have different colored stripes in their wrists and in their ankles (I was inspired by the stripes of bees, originally they didn't have any stripes at all)they have the usual ghost abilities they can also enter dreams often causing mischief and nightmares as well as having telekinesis.like imps,they like causing trouble with people often making their lives more difficult.they don't have final forms since they can shapeshift into whatever shadow form they can think of.personalities Blue (I can't think of any actual names for them) he is mischievous,sneaky and very lazy,he likes causing trouble no matter what,he loves fun so he is active with his shenanigans with his group or with people.Purple:She is snarky and negative,she isn't a fan of fooling around,she prefers to discover what new powers she has.Orange:he is the least violent but also the most dumbest,he often questions things since he doesn't understand easily,he's also the most quietest (he likes to swallow things and then see them go through him since he doesn't have internal organs,then again in my version of hell,none of the demon OCS I create do) Pink:He is self-admiring and proud not necessarily vain,he loves his body and loves working out often kissing his own muscles which makes purple mock him for it,he loves compliments and will stop annoying a person if they flatter him.
I had to improvise a bit. I found myself rummaging for colored pencils so I drew my outfit today with the ones I had. Notice that I am painting because I’m out of pencils. My oversized sweatshirt is really a periwinkle blue.
Clemence was supposed to be the only child but to create more conflict I decided to give her a younger teen sister name Calamity,who's blue,figuratively and literally.she's not goth,she just likes wearing black.Calamity,like most teens,has self-esteem issues and has no hope in herself and thinks the future is going to be grim.
I've been mailing these quick, improvised, hand-drawn doodled envelopes out to random Instagram followers. I'll be doing more of them so follow me @doodlers and let's be friends.
