sketches from the moleskin, siuslaw 8/15

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The Krasue: page 6 of The Horrors.

EPSON MFP image

 

The krasue is a Thai monster, which feeds on entrails, fetuses, placenta, and babies. It’s considered very dangerous to pregnant women, and people put thorny branches around the house to keep it away when someone in the home gets pregnant. It glows red (as seen in this video) and floats. The krasue lives as a normal person during the day- but at night, its head and entrails separate from its body, which it leaves hidden away from view. It must go back to its body by daylight and reattach itself.

The krasue is Thai, but similar beings are known throughout southeast Asia. In all cases, it eats fetuses right out of the womb, and if it can’t find that, it eats animals’ guts or feces. If you leave clothing out overnight to dry, it will wipe its mouth on them, leaving slime, blood, and gore behind. Some say the krasue is a witch, who cast the wrong incantations and was cursed. Others think it is a woman who killed someone in a previous lifetime, or who had an abortion, or even an older woman jealous that she can no longer get pregnant. Still others believe it to be a ghost or supernatural creature, not human at all.

In the image, a krasue has just succeeded in stealing a fetus from a pregnant woman, and flies off, triumphant, to eat it.

 

(All this and more about the krasue, in my book!)

process, sketches for a large oil.

529148_10151419583077712_123877253_n I’m in the planning stages of a larger oil painting so I thought I’d share the process from the start. These are my thumbnails, ideas, and notes for “storming the castle”, a painting which will not include a castle.

I’ve been reading about neanderthal and sasquatch (as usual) and thinking a lot about the medieval myth of the wildman. I have been reading a bit about the iconography and symbolism of wild people and had a dream last night about a shesquatch with a classic old-tyme unicorn. There’s a lot of other things going into this as well but that, so far, is my base idea.

I did some additional research today and reading and took notes. I’ve also got a few pages from my sketchpad showing both the notes I took today and the sketches I did last night. I took the time to go back through and find another few pages of notes and sketches (stuff like sasquatch fur, symbols of purity and of untamed nature, like that) and cherrypicked them into this page of rough notes and sketches. (The deer-man face among those.) As I read more about sasquatch encounters and then about wildman images in the medieval era, I realized that the war there seems both metaphorical (oh, taming nature, the invention of the printing press, you know- whatever happened in the olden times) and very real. The illustrations don’t look like the ones of anomalies and “monsters” but more like the everyday scenes of people that are realistic.

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In other words, I’ve decided that there is a secret history of war between us and our near-relatives, the hidden species of hominid that used to be far more common. Like wolves or bears, I think they were wiped out in most of Europe back in those days. The images of battles and ‘hunting down the wildman’ are pretty brutal and detailed. I’d call it a genocide, maybe?

At any rate, these thoughts, along my underlying mood of slight nostalgia for my younger mayhem and chaos, are starting to turn into something. These pages are the beginning of it. And this is how a really big painting always begins, for me.

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I always have enjoyed drawing more than finishing, but lately since I have been doing so many commissions and smaller pieces, I’ve started to get better at time management.

I take a lot of notes early on and do a lot of small compositional sketches. I think I’m addicted to the thumbnail, as far as the part of the process I enjoy most. But at the same time I get such a good lift from seeing a big work finished, there’s really nothing to compare to that feeling, especially when I don’t feel the piece failed.

I also got a bit of progress in on this jellyfish lady today.

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birthday!

flamingo artwork, paintingI am having an amazing birthday time!

(I made this happy flamingo art yesterday. it’s prismacolor and watercolor on arches hotpress.)

momentum, hair growing, tires spinning

snakeRoseburg is fun. Also sometimes, like this, I schedule a post to autmoagicaly post itself like a robot. I’m writing this in the night time, but tomorrow it will post itself like I just wrote it!

I do this pretty often. It’s because I have a few hours here and there to write, but I want you guys to have something new to read every day. So I pre-schedule posts.

I guess this means if I die in a fiery crash, it will still look like I am writing even after I’m dead, for a day or two! MOMENTUM, inertia, all that.

I ain’t no physkisist but i knows what matters.

At any rate here’s a snake sketch…I want to do this on a forearm or on an inner calf. If you’re interested drop me an email @ resonanteye at gmail.com…

Full color of course.

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