Day 11, And I Think My Brown Paper Sketchbook Is Getting Crinkly From All The Ink Washes. That's Okay;

Day 11, and I think my brown paper sketchbook is getting crinkly from all the ink washes. That's okay; I bought it at a hundred yen shop in Nagano in 2008. The prompt was yokai, which is a bad thing, because I am such a huge enthusiast (read: big freaking nerd) about everything yokai that I got distracted in my Mizuki Shigeru encyclopedias and couldn't decide, which is why I ended up doing two of the most stereotypical yokai choices I could manage. This is an uncommonly skinny tengu,  and chochinobake, whom I accidentally gave two eyes to instead of one. Call it unreasonably high expectations, but I didn't manage to pull off my desired image quality here.

I should probably just do a month of yokai next time instead of a monster challenge. It'd get it out of my system. 

Edit: Herp derp, this is 12, not 11. 

Day 20. Today's prompt was Southeast Asian mythology. This one is a bit of a stretch, and as far as I know and can find, it doesn't directly correspond to any established mythology. Allow me to explain myself.

One of my mother's dear friends is from the Philippines. Now, she told the story once of 'black water', water with a malicious spirit, that purposefully drowns people. It can appear as whirlpools and waterspouts, or as perfectly still black pools and lagoons. This friend believes very really and truly in this idea of 'black water', and has been known to avoid any and all water phenomena associated with it. I can't find a specific term for this. I've tried. If someone else has heard of it, please tell me, because I find it really interesting.

All inks all the time.  

Day 22, and work continues to be awful. Alternative arrangements are in the making, but nothing's happening quickly enough for it to be better. I might sell prints. This is a possibility.

The prompt today was Urban Legend. I did a mysterious white stag from the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey. It apparently guides lost travelers and warns people of disasters. Again, not strictly a monster, but I feel like there's enough monstrosity going on at the moment, and a white deer that helps to prevent disaster would be awfully nice.

Wiki link to deer legend

The next one. I think this is the 9th? I think so. Anyhow, today was dragon. Here is a man. A dragon man. Actually just a dragon? Not sure. Could even be a dragon woman. I am moderately well pleased with this one. 

Ink, brown paper, some acrylic paint. 

Day 18, drawn on the day and posted the next because I am feeling awful and I didn’t get it done before Stupid o’Clock. Today’s prompt was Inuit. This is a Greenland tupilaq. Here is the wiki article on it. 

I wanted to do this one kind of from the very beginning, partly because my sketchbook is full of stupid and angry looking little tupilaq characters designed to look more like the traditional carvings than a shamble of hair and bone and sinew. 

It’s all ink wash with some fountain pen. All of it. 

Day 21. The prompt today was Mesoamerican mythology. I ran into a problem with this one; mainly, there seems to be a huge gap in the scholarship about folkloric monsters in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures. Oh, sure, I found lots of gods and the like, but defining gods as monsters seems like dodgy territory to me. If anyone knows of non-divine supernatural creatures or spirits from those cultures, please send them my way, because now I have The Curiosity.

In light of not finding a huge amount of material to work from, I went with the idea that dogs, and specifically the Xoloitzcuintli dog, was believed to be a guide to the underworld. Now, psychopomps aren’t monsters strictly speaking, and the god associated with the dogs, Xolotl, isn’t a monster either, but there you go.

Dry media to mitigate page buckling.