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Description
Meep, finally!

Here's the February gryphon for the calender I'm working on. Yay! Two months behind! (Er, rather, I have one day to submit March... hehe I swear I've already started it!) Anyhow, this is possibly one of the most work-intensive pieces I've ever done, and it has more coats than an Eskimo, and I really don't want to touch it ever again. I seriously have been working on this thing for two months. And now the pastel is all smeary. Oh well.

So: these are ivory-billed woodpeckers/ocelots in the deep woods of the American south. The male (with the red crest) is called Questlink and the female (black crest) is Chalice.

I'm a total ivory-bill fangirl, btw; their story is one of the most amazing and stirring things I've ever heard. And of course ocelots are very beautiful and also endangered and ALSO happen to live in the same sorts of places as ivory-bills, so it all worked out.

Ahem:
Once upon a time, in the swamps and forests of the Deep South, there lived a magnificent bird, greatest of the American woodpeckers. His feathers were crow-black and swan-white, with a crest red as flame and a long, elegant beak like old ivory. He was known as the Lord God bird, for what people cried out when the saw him, and the Grail bird because he was the rarest and greatest pursuit of many a birder. But men chased this ghost of the deep woods, and sometimes they caught him; and they killed him for the bone-white beak and his crest of fire and hers of coal, and graduallly the ghosts began to disappear. They had never been many, and were now far fewer.
They returned to the core of their forests and swamps, but men followed and took the land with them. And the ghosts vanished for a long, long time. For six tens of years, no flash of such a wing has graced the dusk between the old, twisted trees.
Until now.
Perhaps.
Perhaps a few ghosts became invisible for a time, and lurked in the dank bowels of the Deep Woods where even men and machines do not go. Perhaps they really are gone, and only the ghosts of the ghosts remain. Perhaps the spark of hope is not too be believed.
But maybe, just maybe, it is true. And we must be content with that, with the thought that perhaps a few spirits of flesh and blood still haunt the South, and that perhaps somehow, those who would seek the Grail may, one day, find it.

In other words, the ivory-bill is a beautiful, huge woodpecker, native to the deep mangrove forests, that has been presumed extinct for more than 60 years; tentative sightings have occurred in recent years. Wow.

If you live down there, peeps, always keep an eye out for a large woodpecker with lots of white on its wings! That is a distinct marking--if its wings are folded and you can see white, that's an ivory-bill. Let's all hope that they're out there somewhere!

Media is india ink, Portfolio oil pastel, and Faber-Castell pencils, as always.

Enjoy!

Other gryphons:
Jan: One-For-Silence
Mar: Three-For-Solitude
Apr: Four-For-Survival
May: Five-For-Secrets
Jun: Six-For-Beauty
July: Seven-For-Joy
Aug: Eight-For-Duty

Description
Meep, finally!

Here's the February gryphon for the calender I'm working on. Yay! Two months behind! (Er, rather, I have one day to submit March... hehe I swear I've already started it!) Anyhow, this is possibly one of the most work-intensive pieces I've ever done, and it has more coats than an Eskimo, and I really don't want to touch it ever again. I seriously have been working on this thing for two months. And now the pastel is all smeary. Oh well.

So: these are ivory-billed woodpeckers/ocelots in the deep woods of the American south. The male (with the red crest) is called Questlink and the female (black crest) is Chalice.

I'm a total ivory-bill fangirl, btw; their story is one of the most amazing and stirring things I've ever heard. And of course ocelots are very beautiful and also endangered and ALSO happen to live in the same sorts of places as ivory-bills, so it all worked out.

Ahem:
Once upon a time, in the swamps and forests of the Deep South, there lived a magnificent bird, greatest of the American woodpeckers. His feathers were crow-black and swan-white, with a crest red as flame and a long, elegant beak like old ivory. He was known as the Lord God bird, for what people cried out when the saw him, and the Grail bird because he was the rarest and greatest pursuit of many a birder. But men chased this ghost of the deep woods, and sometimes they caught him; and they killed him for the bone-white beak and his crest of fire and hers of coal, and graduallly the ghosts began to disappear. They had never been many, and were now far fewer.
They returned to the core of their forests and swamps, but men followed and took the land with them. And the ghosts vanished for a long, long time. For six tens of years, no flash of such a wing has graced the dusk between the old, twisted trees.
Until now.
Perhaps.
Perhaps a few ghosts became invisible for a time, and lurked in the dank bowels of the Deep Woods where even men and machines do not go. Perhaps they really are gone, and only the ghosts of the ghosts remain. Perhaps the spark of hope is not too be believed.
But maybe, just maybe, it is true. And we must be content with that, with the thought that perhaps a few spirits of flesh and blood still haunt the South, and that perhaps somehow, those who would seek the Grail may, one day, find it.

In other words, the ivory-bill is a beautiful, huge woodpecker, native to the deep mangrove forests, that has been presumed extinct for more than 60 years; tentative sightings have occurred in recent years. Wow.

If you live down there, peeps, always keep an eye out for a large woodpecker with lots of white on its wings! That is a distinct marking--if its wings are folded and you can see white, that's an ivory-bill. Let's all hope that they're out there somewhere!

Media is india ink, Portfolio oil pastel, and Faber-Castell pencils, as always.

Enjoy!

Other gryphons:
Jan: One-For-Silence
Mar: Three-For-Solitude
Apr: Four-For-Survival
May: Five-For-Secrets
Jun: Six-For-Beauty
July: Seven-For-Joy
Aug: Eight-For-Duty