This Illustration Is Available As Both A Sticker, A Mini Print, And A Larger Print. If You Want To Grab

🐅🐅🐅 This illustration is available as both a sticker, a mini print, and a larger print. If you want to grab this as a mini print for less, it is the one I am giving away to those at the Cerise Swan tier at my Patreon this month. Pledge before the 31st and you’ll get one (and more fun mini prints in the future) for only 10 USD a month with no shipping costs worldwide!✨

Stillness, 2021, graphite and Flashe on translucent Yupo, 7x5 inches, by Heather Lee Birdsong. First image is the artwork; second image shows the backside of the work.

I finally finished this one. I almost sharpened away the pencil I used for the drawing, as I needed to maintain a very fine point. The backside is painted and shows subtly through the polypropylene sheet.

Hemlock, the pretty plant drawn around the folded polygonal form, is easily mistaken for Queen Anne’s Lace (AKA wild carrot) for the unwary. Queen Anne’s Lace was a favorite when I was a child, part of what made me fall in love with the Pacific Northwest. Hemlock, meanwhile, is said to have received the purplish stains on its stems from the spilling of blood (whose blood varies with the telling), and was used to kill people convicted of sedition and treachery (like Socrates, most famously) in Ancient Greece. It is also used, in careful quantities, in some folk medicines and witches’ brews. Every part of the plant is poisonous, so it must be handled with care.

Paul-Albert Besnard.

Heather Lee Birdsong, A Doubtful Dream, 2021, gouache on hot-pressed paper, 18 1/8 x 24 inches.

Unlike a lot of things I make, I had no clear vision for this painting at the outset. I spent months tinkering away at it, letting details evolve as they would while I listened to audiobooks of contemporary novels based on old fairy tales, particularly those tangled up in wooded and wild landscapes. I actually “finished” this piece for the first time in winter, but something felt off. I wrapped it up and packed it away with everything else when my partner and I moved just before the end of the year. I finally brought this piece out again last week, and repainted a section of it. Now I know it’s done.

“The forest allows for enchantment and disenchantment, for it is the place where society’s conventions no longer hold true. It is the source of natural right, thus the starting place where social wrongs can be righted.”

– Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm

paul brooke - wc williams

captain haddock - wc williams