"she Hung, Caught By The Vines"

"she hung, caught by the vines"

so, this is somewhere around the moment where Deergirl looses her antler, it's a bit of a getting chased into the briar patch moment, I wanted to imply she basically jumped into this to escape her pursuers and the tangles of the vines are both entrapping and slowing her fall.

all climbing vines I have always viewed as vaguely predatory, blackberry vines, grape vines, wysteria, kudzu, morning glory, climbing roses, ivy, and any plant that climbs and strangles.

I want to show a lot of moral ambiguity though, the vines could hold onto her and use her rotting body as plant food after she eventually dies, but they dump her on the ground instead. likewise the wolves could decide to eat her at any point, but they need somebody with hands for particular tasks.

this slide show is about my progress putting together my fish drawing. these photos were taken over time as I worked to make the tedium of a million little textures more interesting.

this one is called something like "Bad News Birds" it's tiny and crude and it was a part of my proposal for the whole deer girl project.

deer girl talks to birds, or more accurately she listens to birds. because birds know what is up. this is just a fary tale fact. I remade this piece as an intaglio but I think this one is still pretty good.

origin of the first bit of on the spot bullshitting when my teacher asked why she doesn't have any clothes on, I replied, she lives in the woods, you can't get clothes in the woods. of course I came up with a dress for the next one. one I still have yet to explain. oh well.

I still like the face on this one, it was so effing tiny and I still got that nose just right.

little victories.

the title is "good time management" I have also called it "Kate vs. Kate" this was the first thing I made when I stopped making art of fish, it was inspired by how motivated I felt after the McNett Event when I got to smash a giant pinata as part of a giant howling mob.

(seriously, we'll get there with the deer girl prints, I just have to get there, gotta build up to a crescendo like that)

anyways, the dueling self portraits were made by first photographing myself on a computer downstairs with the PhotoBooth application, then printing them out, applying red iron oxide to the back and tracing them onto the asphaltum of the plate. so there you go, that's why the look so good despite my inferior drafting skills.

the hat and the knife, the fangs and the snake hair are of course made up elements worked into the figures, everything else is the days (more like nights) I spent aquatinting both my black and red plates.

I gave one of these to Spike, and I'm still really happy about that. I have one left and I think I'm keeping it, it would mean so very little to anybody else.

alright, so this one is another one that was originally made, and still exists slightly out of sequence. I'm kind of ok with that because I just really like it. this feeling I wanted to evoke was one of finding people who like you, like having you around, and want you to have a bowl of soup and feel better.

I worked out later when putting these things in sequence and while working out images for my BFA year that the black wolf would have either taken her here to meet the trees, or on their way to where the black wolf is leading her they met the Trees. so that's where this fits into antler-chronology.

the branch as antler is a pervasive image when I go to look for other deer girl images other people have made. it makes sense, usually antlers are only for male deer. but for my own symbolic purposes I think of it like: previously she was wandering around unbalanced due to the loss of one antler, now it is replaced by something wholly new. the budding leaves an eventual flowers that are also taking over her other antler. again, this may possibly be a terrible idea. but as it is at the top of her head it can be considered a capacity for a higher oneness, not just between animal and human, but animal, human and plant.

well, that's the hippie BS angle anyway.

notes on making this image: the trees are mostly modeled after my friend Sam and his best friend Stephanie, they are super cool and Sam really does pat me on the head sometimes when I am upset and it does really help. leaf hair would not have been possible without the help of the painkillers I was on at the time, like many things in printmaking it was monotonous and exacting but all the more rewarding for that.

this is still one of my favorites of the big prints.

so, this is another one with what I would consider a reluctant title, by which I mean I was reluctant to title it, even as again, the title is very popular among unfamiliar viewers. the title in this case draws the attention of the viewer to what is actually going on, where I though the image was good enough on it's own. oh well.

"It Didn't Look Tasty"

refers to the dead and presumably previously masticated rabbit in her hand. (note to art people, there is only one really good picture of a dead rabbit on the internet, and everybody who wants to draw one is drawing it) the wolves have decided that Deer Girl needs to eat it and she is completely unsure about this whole "eating meat" idea. she is inherently half herbivore, and even as she is half human, and knows humans may eat meat, but it's cooked meat. it is a gift though, and she has to accept it.

this is the first appearance of the wolves and originally I meant them to be a wholly negitive force of ravening destruction, here demanding compliance,

seeming to say "accept our shitty gift and be in our debt so you'll do what we want you to or we'll eat you"

"heck, we'll eat you later"

but I guess I don't do unambiguous morals. the wolves are a force for what I might consider the winter people, as opposed to the summer people, (which is very much jadis vs. aslan)  but they need somebody with hands, there is somebody killing animals in the woods, there are encroachments on their territory, and they need Deer Girl to pick up the lantern and help them to fight.

in taking a bit of their gift deer girl accepts: moral gray areas, and the need to grow up stand up and do something. she loses her innocence and her life from beforehand and is thrust into a conflict on the side of what the summer people would evil. she can no longer be just an animal, she must become a full person.

as this is the Call to Adventure, I'm pretty pleased that I can look at it and say, look, it references the Chariot Card with one black and one white wolf. I wish I could say that was fully intentional. this is very much what I consider the first Real and Actual Deer Girl print because it was the first printed large in what became a consistent format. every thing else before it, is a bit embryonic.

Edit: added a picture I took when I was working on this so you can see it at the penciling stage. I take these pictures while I work on the drawing part so that I can flip them easily with the Mac's photobooth application and check how my composition will look when I am done.