Happy Glorious 25th Of May

happy glorious 25th of may

As much as I'm looking forward to drawing something that isn't a bird (with the perhaps vain hope that the bestiary authors will give us a bit more to work with 😅) I've been really enjoying getting better at drawing birds!

I felt that just filling the nest with red made sense stylistically (and I also didn't fancy going too realistic with the gore 😆). I also feel like I've been learning a lot from all the other artists taking part in the challenge, for instance, I've tried to take some inspiration from @silverhart-makes-art in terms of the thought going in to making a viable creature, @sweetlyfez's use of colour, or @coolest-capybara's storytelling... I also love the inventiveness of some of the other artists too!

Bestiaryposting Results: Rubkawat

Here are the results to this week's bestiaryposting -- still only a few people on board for this one, really hoping this is just because people are sick of Birds. As usual, if you are confused by what I'm talking about, you can find out about it at: https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting.

The entry our artists are working from is here:

Results below the cut, in roughly chronological order:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has again given us a realistic-looking creature drawn in an impressive naturalistic style. It is distinctly skinny as the entry suggests, with a pointy beak for its stabbing behavior. The explanation linked in the above post notes that this design takes inspiration from the kiwi and the bittern, which makes sense and I think works well here. Cute little bastard, too -- look at him. I think it can hiding in reeds very well. (This one is in reeds currently. Or grass at least.)

@sweetlyfez (link to post here) notes that the blood thing is almost certainly a Biblical allegory, but she likes the idea that it's just a reinterpretation of natural red coloration. I agree -- it definitely is an allegory, as the Aberdeen Bestiary makes clear in the "interpretation" section I usually leave out of these:

Thus after three days, it revives its young with its blood, as Christ saves us, whom he has redeemed with his own blood.

... but I think I much prefer it as a fanciful interpretation of a natural feather pattern. Also, check out those Stylized Plants. I know I'm kind of a broken record about this, but over the course of this project, one thing I have learned about myself is that I am unaccountably delighted by Stylized Plants every time. These are thematically appropriate for a bird said to live in Egypt -- they look like they would fit right in with ancient Egyptian depictions of papyrus reeds or lotus flowers. Apologies to anyone who is tired of me pointing out the Stylized Plants at every opportunity; it will happen again.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) is clearly having some fun with these, based on the tone of their (detailed and interesting) post about the design and artistic process, please go read that. (Also thank you for including alt text.) Apparently they were informed by @coolest-capybara that their Rubkawat chicks resemble Woodstock from Peanuts, and... you know what? I see it. What I particularly like here is the decision to fill the nest with a cartoonishly large amount of blood -- I just find it charming in a way I can't articulate. Just... just hose those chicks down, that'll fix them.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) never disappoints with her medieval stylization. I am delighted with the decision to make the Rubkawat a flamingo -- the linked post explains that this is inspired by flamingos having red crop milk, which is not something I know about because I am not a Bird Expert. I also really like the sequential-art style of the chicks at the bottom, so we can see them being resurrected by the blood. The one on the right makes me smile, because it looks very much like it's contemplating the blood on it and thinking, like, "...ew."

@pomrania (link to post here) is Tired of Birds, so they decided this one could be a dinosaur -- technically a bird, just not a modern one. I like it; dinosaurs are great. They've also taken the route of deciding the story about resurrecting chicks with blood is just a fanciful interpretation of red feathers, which I still like. (In the linked post, they explain their design decision and artistic process in detail, go look at it.) Also look at that little chick -- it's darling.

Pretty much everyone involved here said something along the lines of "I absolutely know what bird this is supposed to be because I've heard this myth before", which I suppose shouldn't be surprising. I don't know how widespread that particular bit of trivia is in the general population, but in the demographics of "people who follow this blog about medieval stuff" and/or "people who like playing with bestiary entries", I figure it's probably pretty well-known. So here's the Aberdeen Bestiary version:

Yes, this is the pelican.

The birds in the illumination don't particularly look like pelicans, though apparently one doesn't really find them in Western Europe, so I suppose that's to be expected. (Particularly since the entry doesn't describe their most identifiable physical feature, the beak / throat pouch arrangement.) The fact that pelicans are associated with Egypt and apparently don't really show up in most of Europe is surprising to me -- I grew up on the east coast of the U.S. and saw pelicans all the time, so I kind of just assumed they were common to other Atlantic coasts. But you know what they say about assuming.

Anyway, for anyone who didn't know about the story with the pelican and the blood, versions of this were pretty widespread in the medieval period. It was a sufficiently popular symbol that it found its way into heraldry -- the pelican in her piety is a heraldic device that shows the pelican wounding its own breast while standing over its young. (In some versions of the story, it feeds its young with the blood rather than using it to resurrect them.) Not only is it still present in surviving heraldry, but it also occasionally appears in more modern contexts, like the Louisiana state flag:

You can decide yourself whether this information changes your opinion on whether, as this post claims, a pelican mouth is a good place for a baby: (link to post).

That's about all the pelican material I have, but allow me to leave you with a song (which is itself part of an old Edward Lear poem set to music):

Baby! <3

Baby Horse Shoe

And on the subject of foxes and etymology. Fuchsia? The color? It’s named for fuchsia, the plant…

… which was itself named for Leonhart Fuchs, whose family name means fox. Which also means that we’re almost certainly not pronouncing it the way it was intended to be pronounced.

Of course the resemblance of Fuchs to a certain other word in English has long been noted in a bunch of almost certainly apocryphal headlines.

Don’t confuse fuchsia with magenta, originally a fuchsine dye which was renamed after the Italian town of Magenta following the French victory there in 1859.

obsessed with the way my robotics team lead talks

she’s reinventing hieroglyphics