Elijah David

Yesterday's prompt for the April Fae art challenge was Portal. Since I've been doing a poem a day this month as well as the art challenge, I started brainstorming what a portal poem might be like -- and what portals have been special to me over the years. The tendency in fantasy movies and shows like Once Upon a Time is to have a swirling vortex as the gateway between worlds. (I'm not immune to this image. In fact, the main method of inter-world travel in the Non de Velai books is a shimmering silver pool, though it often appears between two trees.) But the portals that appear in fiction are often more varied than that. The first portal stories I can remember seeing were The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland . The portals in these stories are naturally occurring phenomena: a tornado/twister/cyclone (whatever term you prefer) and a rabbit hole. While tornadoes weren't common where I grew up (outside of hurricane season), holes in the ground were common enoug...

It's time again for Watercolor Wednesday. I painted a couple more postcards this month as well as a quote piece for one of the quotes that didn't make it onto the larger quote collage last month. First up, the Cheshire Cat postcard. I loved how the Cheshire Cat turned out in last month's quote collage around the "c" in "Chance and careful planning" and wanted to try painting him on a larger scale. I'm pleased with the mixture of the colors this time around, though I had some trouble keeping the purple consistent. The grin remained pretty well defined too, considering I don't have any masking fluid to keep the space clear of paint. I didn't even attempt to paint the legs and paws because 1) I would have botched them terribly and 2) he's the Cheshire Cat, so he might just be phasing his limbs out of focus. We'll go with that. Next, my attempt to paint a sunset we observed on one of our drives home in the last few months. ...

I tried a couple of different things in this month's paintings. I used paints from both sets I mentioned last time, and did two sketches on the medium-sized pad I painted Night and the Moon on. The third piece I painted this month was a quotes word art piece with some of my favorite literary quotations. Hipster Tumnus was anachronistic before it was cool. For Narnia, I discovered how truly terrible I am with eyes, and Tumnus ended up with sunglasses. o_O I did feel proud of my rendition of his legs, however. The background isn't half bad, and I was able to try my hand with the scraping textures again. Mortimer and the door from Albion Academy Mortimer turned out well, though not quite as I'd envisioned him. I think my attempts at texture fell a bit short, but that may have been due partly to the size pf the salt I used (sea salt as opposed to kosher or table). I do like the color of Mortimer's skin here, though I wish I could have given it a smokier fe...