Playing around with Backgrounds...

Just for grins, I redid an older drawing as a sort of scroll. Not sure why I did it, I must have too much time on my hands, but it looks sort of interesting...

The Forest Wife

The Forest Wife, also known as the Huldra, is another evil Scandinavian fey spirit. Like her sister, the Havsra, she lures people to their doom. The victims, mostly men, find their life slowly drained away, or their mind slowly falling to pieces until they are either dead or insane. Instead of living by the sea, the Huldra lives in forested areas. They are said to be a very attractive woman when seen from the front, but either have a hollow back, a back made up of tree bark, or a fox or cow tail. This is often the only tip off of what the creature truly is to an unfortunate victim.

I added a cheesy digital background. I have yet to add a background on the original. I put her in basically the same clothing as her sister, the Hasvra.

The Sea Wife

The Sea Wife, or Hasvra, is a spirit from Scandinavia. The were believed to lure men to their doom on the sea, much like the Sirens of ancient Greece.

This is a rough drawing over a digitized comic style background. The original has no background yet, but it will be something similar.

The Changeling

It is said that sometimes Earthly babies are switched by the Fey. Is this her child or is she doomed to raise a monster?

Trephine

Here is another of the veiled ghostly girls I have done as of late. She is sort of roughly imagined as a Western version of a Ubune, a haunt related to mothering and childbirth. Something sort of wrong about a pregnant ghost, though. Maybe she is Trephine, of the Conomor legend. Conomor was a Britannic king known to slaughter his wives when they became pregnant.

Not really sure why I did it. A lot of these things I don't really plan.

Cora update, sort of...

Back in March, I was in the process of creating a webcomic / graphic story about the girl pictured above. She was intended to be vaguely gothish' I guess you could say, and represented the classical "Queen of the Dead" as found in the old myths of Persephone, or Frya. Her name was even a twist on this Underworld goddess theme, Cora. All was fine and dandy, and it seemed she was all I was concentrating on. She was getting more refined and easier to draw.

This was all great, until we decided to add a member to the houshold.

Guess what? The wife brings home a white dog, sight unseen by me, named Cora. Dogs are normally seen as accompanying many underworld figures, notably Hecate, which Cora (Kore) is seen to be an aspect of. The impact of this was not missed by me. It was all too prophetic in a weird sort of way. Strange, I thought. Then this beast then began to growl at me and in general try to take over the house. She then attacked our other original dog, injuring her very badly. I decided this was too much, and she was a danger to the children, so we sent her away to live at some other dogs at a farm for vicious animals.

I have not drawn Cora since. This whole episode being slightly disturbing. I guessed I would give it a break for a while.

It does make for a good story, however.

Ghostly Veiled Girls...

Lately, I have been practicing drawing with figures of veiled ghostly females. Here is the latest. It is very similar to the others, since I am basically using the same model, and concentrating on different aspects.