Noon-day Witch - Tumblr Posts

Day 19. The prompt was Slavic mythology. I'll admit that I really don't know that much about Slavic mythology, which is why I went Wikipedia surfing until I crash-landed onto this spirit/monster. This is Poludnica, or the Noon-day Witch. She causes heatstroke and disorientation in the sunlight, and appears in the fields on the hottest days of the year.

I currently live in a place where it gets to be 105 Fahrenheit/40 Celsius during the height of summer, and it's dry as hell. If you've never lived in a place where the heat is so palpably murderous, and where the wind blowing feels like you've stuck your head inside an oven, you will probably not understand why the Noon-day Witch feels like a somewhat realistic proposition. 

Read the wiki article, she's very interesting.

Starting on a new woodcut print. This is a much larger version of my Noon-Day Witch sketch from last fall. Final will be printed 18x24".

And a close-up of the witch herself. A lot of this is going to have a pretty different line quality once it’s actually cut, but this gives me a starting point.

Prints currently in progress. These are the color renderings for some hand-drawn limited edition screenprints/serigraphs I'm doing at the moment. Rather than using photographic emulsion, my studio partner and I have been experimenting with a tusche-and-glue method. I teach drawing for a living and her background is in lithography, so the direct mark making is a real appeal. These prints are going to be reduction prints, so the whole color process is done entirely on a single screen. The top one is Poludnica, the Noon-Day Witch. I did a sketch a couple years ago and thought it would make a nice print. The third one down is print versions of my nesting dolls. The bottom, obviously, is Weirdo.