Cheapsweets - CheapSweets

Friends with Benefits

the painter Rodney Matthews has done a lot of extremely badass bug art over his career, but i really want to highlight these album covers he did as especially incredible depictions of little bug dudes rocking out

and in particular i'd really like to focus your attention of the greatest keyboardist of all time

Fernand Khnopff - Caress of the Sphinx (oil on canvas, 1896)

Sphinx but instead of asking people riddles, it just badly and awkwardly flirts with people instead

The Maternal Ghraggal

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum

Pencil sketch, then lines in Sailor fude nib fountain pen, using Diamine Sepia ink.

Thought process under the cut…

"The Ghraggal is named for its swiftness [redacted]. It is a beast distinguished by its varied markings, its courage and its extraordinary speed. Hircania is their main home."

So, this is basically all the physical description we get about this creature. It's fast, so I figured I'd give it quite long limbs. We know it's a beast, but not a lot else. If in doubt, by default beast is something somewhat dog or wolf-like, so we have a vaguelly canine-looking creature with long legs and a variety of markings, ranging from almost like stripes on the legs, to finer spots on its underside and larger, more irregular shapes on its back and sides. Hopefully it all gels together as something coherent; I took a lot of influence from the patterns on girafffes, particularly the Rothschild's, Masai and Southern sub-species.

As an aside, Hyrcania seems to be part of modern day Turkmenistan and Iran, which doesn't actually help. However, Hyrcania roughly translates as 'wolf land', which would be a reall cool reason for me to lean 'slightly canine' except I found out about it after I'd done the drawing... ;)

"The female Ghraggal, when she finds her lair empty by the theft of a child, follows the tracks of the thief at once. When the thief sees that, even though he rides a swift horse, he is outrun by her speed, and that there is no means of escape at hand, he devises the following deception. When he sees the female Ghraggal drawing close, he throws down a glass sphere. The female Ghraggal is deceived by her own image in the glass and thinks it is her stolen child. She abandons the chase, eager to gather up her young. Delayed by the illusion, she tries once again with all her might to overtake the rider and, urged on by her anger, quickly threatens the fleeing man. Again he holds up her pursuit by throwing down a sphere. The memory of the trick does not banish the mother's devotion. She turns over the empty likeness and settles down as if she were about to suckle her child. And thus, trapped by the intensity of her sense of duty, she loses both her revenge and her child."

What. A. Jerk. Amirite?

Again, very fast creature, faster than a swift horse. Also, if we're being charitable, not the smartest creature either...

We also know that this is a creature that is valuable enough for someone to raise one from a baby, that hunters have developed increasingly expensive and elaborate methods to achieve this theft!

This did take me down a bit of a rabbit hole of 'crystal ball photography', which I tried to recreate as best possible. :)

Really interesting seeing some of the similarities (and differences) in the interprestations here :)

Bestiaryposting Results: Yagstong

I almost forgot to do this two weeks in a row. Just a really hectic month over here, sorry.

Anyway, if you want to know what this is all about, you can find out at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting.

The art below is based on this entry:

And this is the one we're doing next:

Now, art:

@mistressorinoco (link to post here) has done a delightful mix of different animals here, all of which manages to come together into a cohesive whole. See the linked post for details on which features are here and why. I also like the throat sac thing.

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has drawn a fairly striking yet realistic creature -- the mane and tusks are really working for it here. This design, like the above, is highly concerned with making the beast properly adapted to its environment, and you can find out more about that in the linked post.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has drawn some adorably goofy-looking creatures. The wideset eyes, the protruding teeth, the downright spherical juvenile there.... I love them. As usual, information on this design's influences can be found in the linked post.

@pomrania (link to post here), collaborating with @theforceisstronginthegirl, has drawn something that is a mashup of "goat", "llama", and "donkey". I particularly like the magical effects around the one tasting the dittany.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) decided to go in a very goat-like direction, and you can find an explanation of why in the linked post. Solid goat-thing there. They also speculate about dittany (I'm not sure why that keeps coming up either), and note that they hope someone else chose to draw the canonically-fat baby Yagstong -- luckily Coolest-Capybara has them covered.

@wendievergreen (link to post here) has done two drawings of this one. It should be noted that in the first drawing, that box is not diegetic -- the beast's lusty nature has been censored. For details on why this design, and some interesting information on dittany, please see the linked post.

So! The Aberdeen Bestiary. We actually have two pictures of this one -- there seem to have been three originally, but one has been cut out of the manuscript.

So very obviously this is the goat, which I think multiple people clocked right away. Say one thing for this illustrator, they can draw a pretty good goat.

The missing image is from the entry for he-goat, which is bafflingly separate from the main goat entry. They're not even next to each other; "goat" is on both sides of f.14 while "he-goat" is on both sides of f.21. This is possibly to do with the fact that the Latin terms chosen are capre and hyrco -- English, to my knowledge, lacks a dedicated term for "male goat" like we have for sheep and cows (i.e., "ram" and "bull" respectively), but Latin has one. So maybe there was some confusion.

Not a lot to add here, but I do like one element of the commentary the people who digitized the Aberdeen Bestiary left: they note that the image of the goat scratching its head with its hoof has nothing to do with anything mentioned in the entry. Maybe the illustrator just saw goats do that and thought it would make a good picture?