As Someone With Adhd, This Passage Feels Like A Warm Hug

As someone with adhd, this passage feels like a warm hug

The self-sacrificing Rubkawat

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum (thanks again for running these!)

Initial pencil sketch, then lines in Pental brush pen, and colours with Derwent inktense paint. The brush pen is really fun to use, and you can produce some interesting effects and lovely transitions between thin and thick lines... I think I need some more practice! 😅 I would have loved to get in some more fine details on the chicks, but I've enjoyed getting to grips with the pen a bit more, even if a lot of that is learning what I still have to get better at! On the plus side, it proved to be completely waterfast (particularly compared to my fountain pen inks), which worked nicely with the concept I had.

You can also see where I started painting the water a slightly deeper colour, then changed my mind and watered down the paint a lot more. We'll just say that bit's deeper or something, right? 😉

Reasoning below the cut...

"The Rubkawat is a bird of Egypt, living in the wilderness of the River Nile, from which it gets its name. It is devoted to its young. When it gives birth and the young begin to grow, they strike their parents in the face. But their parents, striking back, kill them. On the third day, however, the mother-bird, with a blow to her flank, opens up her side and lies on her young and lets her blood pour over the bodies of the dead, and so raises them from the dead."

Okay, so I'm pretty much 100% sure that I know what this creature is (I'll be very surprised if I'm wrong, that is some pretty specific behavious described there), so I was trying really hard not to let that knowledge influence my drawing. We know it's a water bird (I also read the description similar to @silverhart-makes-art and wondered whether it gave live birth, but wasn't sure how to represent this short of having no broken eggshells in the nest). As such, we've again got a generic-ish looking water bird, went with a white colour partially to proovide contrast with the other main colour, and partially because I associate Egypt with white birds (Egyptian vulture, ibis...), as well as a lot of water birds such as egrets.

We have a pointy but reasonably broad beak because we need something that can do some damage 😟 and I gave it some eyebrows/tufts of feather above its eyes as a bit of little egret swag - there were originally only meant to be two tufts, but after I drew them in with the brush pen I realised the perspective was off, so I added two more to even it out :D

The nest is partially surrounded by water, and we have some reeds to reflect that the Rubkawat is probably nesting in the marshes of the river Nile.

So, we have a red patch on the mother's cheek where the chicks pecked at her three days earlier, on her beak where she's opened up her side, and... well, I didn't want to go too realisitic, hence the blood flowing from the wound and filling up the whole of the inside of the nest, covering the chicks (apart from their eyes).

Most of my chicks from previous challenges have been at more of a distance - as noted above, I would have liked to reliably get some finer lines in there, but we do have some more detail. Now, @coolest-capybara mentioned to me that she thought my chicks reminded her of Woodstock from the Peanuts comics, and this isn't something that had ever occurred to me, but it's also nothing I can deny! 😆 We have some small, fuzzy (and if we're honest, probably quite wet and sticky now...) chicks clambering to their feet, flopping around and yelling now they've been resurrected.

"It is also a characteristic of this bird, they say, that it always suffers from thinness, and that whatever it swallows, it digests immediately, because its stomach has no separate pocket in which to retain food. Food does not fatten its body, therefore, but only sustains it and gives it strength."

Slightly tricky one given than 90% of a bird is floof and feathers... If the creature is the one I suspect it is, I can see how this particular myth originated, but we're not going there! I probably could have made the mother bird a bit thinner, but I think I was focused more on the other aspects of the description and of making her bird-shaped. Things to consider for the future 🙂

I've been having a lot of fun having an excuse to experiment with different mediums, and still loving the other interpretations; been nice doing some digging into some different influences (like the afore-mentioned dinosaur - though I love the hornbill influence on @silverhart-makes-art's piece too, definitely not something that would have crossed my mind!).

Bestiaryposting Results: Fekthrud

Happy Liminalmas, everybody! We've got fewer results than usual this week, which I would speculatively credit to a variety of factors:

Weird liminal space at the end of the year

It's Another Bird

Not a ton of fun details

It's easy to guess what the animal is

Anyhow, if you want to see the context for this, the page where I collect these posts is here: https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. (Hmm -- looks like I forgot to update the page last time around. Maybe that's part of the issue too.) And the entry that people are working from is here:

So, our results, roughly chronologically:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has given us these very well-rendered pheasant-like creatures. They've given their Fekthrud a head like a Pachycephalosaurus*, which I think is a great way to interpret the whole business about the hard skull; like, that had not occurred to me when reading the entry, but now that I see it, it makes perfect sense. In general these are excellent birds here, and you can see some brief notes on design decisions in the post linked above. I like the justification that a ground bird makes the most sense if they're adapted for falling on rocks and/or running into stuff head-first.

*Proud of myself for spelling "pachycephalosaurus" correctly without looking -- being a former Dinosaur Kid pays weird niche dividends.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) continues to impress with her medieval-style drawings. (And to provide alt-text, thank you.) I really like how colorful and generally very pretty she's made her Fekthrud. I also appreciate the decision to show them attacking someone who is trying to take that "iron rod" advice. Very correct response -- get 'em, birds. If you click the link to her post above, you can see some discussion of design decisions.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) has made the excellent decision to pose their Fekthrud like it's giving a speech. (And the generous decision to provide alt text, thank you.) This bird absolutely looks like it's saying "Ave!" -- I can clearly imagine it addressing the Roman Senate. Cheapsweets has also taken inspiration from Pachycephalosaurus, and I love that two of our artists got there independently -- like I said, it's an idea that makes perfect sense once you think of it. The post linked above contains a detailed discussion both of their design decision and of their artistic process, including an image of their tools and materials. Go read it.

@pomrania (link to post here) has decided that, rather than make the actual bone of the Fekthrud's skull thick. it should have a thick cushion of feathers. I don't know much about birds, but I feel like that makes sense: thick and heavy bone might be a weight issue if this thing is supposed to fly, so a feather cushion might be more practical protection. The goofy look with the tongue lolling out is also quite charming. In the post linked above, you can see some brief notes on design and process.

And... that's it for this week. Like I said, not a lot of people did this one. So, the Aberdeen Bestiary version:

Yeah, so, of course this one is the parrot.

The medieval illustrator is actually pretty close, I think. And they've used one of my favorite styles of Generic Medieval Plant, even though it doesn't look like it can support the parrot's weight.

The entry is broadly accurate, except for the bit about the skull and the iron rod. There are parrots in India with the coloration described -- multiple species, actually, as far as I can tell. They do talk, though I can't speak to the tongue anatomy thing.

Moreover, if you were a parrot trainer in India who wanted to impress medieval Europeans with your talking birds -- maybe so you can establish demand for them in a new market -- of course the first thing you'd do is train your parrots to greet people in Latin and Greek. Latin is the obvious catch-all, and Greek is the majority language in Constantinople, which is the trade hub you want to target. So I bet all the parrots from India that medieval Europeans saw really did say "Ave!" and "Kere!" (And we do know that people in the Byzantine Empire had pet parrots, so I guess it worked.)

I've never heard the thing about parrots having a hard skull and beak. I kind of wonder if, at some point, someone saw a parrot being struck by its owner (or the aforementioned hypothetical merchant) and asked if it was really necessary to beat the poor bird like that -- and got a line like "oh, they have really hard skulls, it doesn't hurt them as much as you think"... and then that just stuck.

Anyway, that's it for this week. Hope y'all are enjoying Birds because you're getting another one next week.

Here's my favorite drawings of 2023, wooooo! It's so fun to see all the different seasons represented. I'm curious, which of these do you like most?

Thank you for following along with my art this year! I feel so lucky that anyone connects with my weird little drawings. Your attention and kindness is very much appreciated. ♥

Here's to more growth in 2024!

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