Ravens

Dear Sarah - Y2/Day15 of our daily drawing exchange

Hi Sarah -

Why do ravens (clever, sociable, funny birds that they are) have such a dark and menacing reputation? As our hero approaches the stronghold, ravens. And, a yellow landscape suggesting the mountains are about to run out and open into the barren landscape beyond, a desert that nobody crosses.

I’m totally impressed, btw, by your skill with your non-dominant hand. I feel as though I don’t even know how to hold a pencil with my wrong hand…

Cheers,
Nikki

Hi Nikki,

You’re right about ravens—they get a bad rap. Edgar Allen Poe didn’t help the ravens’ image at all. In Norse mythology, Odin had a pair of ravens—Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory), who flew around and brought news back to him. Very handy for a god. But apparently their bad rap is due to the fact that they are carrion birds and thus associated with death. A flock of ravens is called an unkindness or a conspiracy. Your book’s hero is not going to have much fun in the Stronghold, is he?

Today I fooled around with ink and watercolour and some new pens—white, silver, gold and copper—seeing if they would show up on a dark background. I think they will show up really well on black paper, but not so much on a dark gray. Then I dropped some red ink into small puddles of water and turned the puddles into flowers. Meh. My dinner wasn’t quite ready, so I did another set of left/right drawings in ink, never taking the pen off the page as I drew my Nutri-Bullet And once again, I think I like the non-dom hand drawing better, even though I made a rather large mistake. It matters not.

XO S