Princess Crow in Her Parlor

The Princess at Home in Her Parlor, two 6"x6" panels with collage, oil paint, colored pencil, wax medium.
CLICK TO ENLARGE if you please. She loses a lot of detail at blog-friendly size.

On Monday when I took the trash out, I found a small bit of spangled ribbon on the ground, and thought that it looked like a collar or necklace for one of my creatures. And here's the creature, finished last night, still drying on the still life table in my studio.

I had already taken these two wooden panels -- small ones, 6" square and 1.5" deep -- and used wax to collage some interestingly patterned tissue paper onto them. The pattern is very wallpaper-like, and very red. And then I had the drawings I'd already done of the young crow I once rescued from entrapment in a deep basement window well.

I flipped the drawing and copied it onto one of the panels, then picked up a black wax-lead pencil and began drawing twigs, a nest, a moon. Layers of translucent wax/paint gave everything color, and I allowed the "wallpaper" to peek through, because after all the sky is a living room for our young Princess. Some of the pattern served as remnants of foliage on the tree.

The necklace had to go on carefully, because if I covered it in paint by accident I'd never get that off. A thick layer of translucent wax, a few slippery adjustments, a few strokes of black to soften the edge, and STOP NOW YOU FOOL, IT'S DONE.

Still, I needed a moon: Something silver, with a subtle texture, easily collaged into place, shiny enough to complement the crow's necklace but not so attention-grabbing that it stole the show.

Nothing I had in the studio would do.

So I put my shoes on and went down to the street, in the dark, looking for a discarded gum wrapper in the litter. That's what the moon in this piece is made of.

Carried Away by a Raven: Original Drawing for Wednesday

SOLD

Carried away, in the sense that this was supposed to be another half-hour drawing but it took at least twice that long because, well, how was I supposed to stop?

Autumn Queen is 10 x 8." Sketched out in terra-cotta colored pastel pencil, then micron pen, watercolors, and white acrylic. I love this image a lot and will miss her when she's gone; $60, plus $5 shipping if applicable.

Click here for  Prints and Greeting Cards of this image

The Crowned Corvids, Continued

The Jackdaw, Triumphant. Fourth in the Crowned Corvids series, which I am enjoying more and more as I get bolder with my designs.

The Jackdaw is a European species we don't have in North America, and is considered a variety of crow. There are stories about these birds, going all the way back to Aesop, who told a tale in which the Jackdaw wanted to be King, so he picked up a lot of fallen peacock feathers and paraded around in them, lording it over the other Jackdaws and then trying the trick among the peacocks themselves. It didn't end well, with the poor fool Jackdaw outcast from both the peacocks' society and his own.

A much later tale from the 1800s has him stealing a jeweled ring from a Catholic cardinal, and being caught out by the Cardinal's curses. Again, in the end, he was humiliated and brought down.

These stories made me think about the idea of "too big for your britches" -- of people having an intrinsic "place" from which we mustn't try to rise. I know that there's more to it than that; it's simply that I think the "don't pretend to be what you're not" stories can be a good thing or a bad one, because who's to say what you are, or could be? How many people have wasted their potential because "people like me don't [become wealthy, go to college, write books, whatever]"?

So I gave my Jackdaw a souvenir of his adventures with the peacocks, worn with pride; and in my tale, he got to keep that small treasure he found, because God has a sense of humor and the Cardinal was rich enough. It's possible in my world to both be who you really are, and be better than you were.

Shameless promotion time: If you like these little fellows, you can find prints, greeting cards, and even cell phone cases at my FineArtAmerica page. They're a fun site known for excellent quality and service.