Day 19. The Prompt Was Slavic Mythology. I'll Admit That I Really Don't Know That Much About Slavic Mythology,

Day 19. The prompt was Slavic mythology. I'll admit that I really don't know that much about Slavic mythology, which is why I went Wikipedia surfing until I crash-landed onto this spirit/monster. This is Poludnica, or the Noon-day Witch. She causes heatstroke and disorientation in the sunlight, and appears in the fields on the hottest days of the year.

I currently live in a place where it gets to be 105 Fahrenheit/40 Celsius during the height of summer, and it's dry as hell. If you've never lived in a place where the heat is so palpably murderous, and where the wind blowing feels like you've stuck your head inside an oven, you will probably not understand why the Noon-day Witch feels like a somewhat realistic proposition. 

Read the wiki article, she's very interesting.

I'll level with the world here; I'm still not doing great. My job has turned into a huge source of anxiety, and I'm at a pretty lousy and stand-still place right now. What I want to do is make art; I don't just want to draw pictures, I want to get back to having a studio and making art and showing it.

I've been in at least two shows a year every year since 2007, and this is going to be the first time since then that I've got nothing. I crashed back from living overseas and getting a master's degree to living in my parents' house and working at a dead-end minimum wage job that isn't helping me get out again.  

I'm not sure what to do, but I do know that I feel like a huge burden on my friends and family at the moment. I don't want to be here and nothing seems to be changing. I am isolated and stuck, and I'd kill for something good to happen right about now. 

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 10. Prompt was ghost/phantom. I like drawing ghosts and wraiths. My sketchbooks are full of them, funny enough. 

Brown paper, ink, white paint, so forth and so on. 

The eighth one. Today’s prompt was dullahan/headless horseman. I am not feeling particularly revolutionary with this one, but I am working on my brush painting, so there you go. I think this is just the standard Headless Horseman, out to ruin the evenings of camping teenagers and hikers out after sunset.

Brown paper. Ink. That’s how we’re rolling lately. 

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