Warrior Women Wednesday: Zenobia

History Star Wars: Queen Elizabeth I

Queen Elizabeth I

Warrior Women Wednesday: Maria Bochkareva

Every Wednesday of 2016 (starting late, obviously... sorry!) I'm going to post a drawing of an action lady from history: presenting WARRIOR WOMEN WEDNESDAYS.

Partly it's 'cause I figured this would be fun to draw, but also because I grew up thinking that ladies were, with rare and high-profile exceptions (Mary Read & Anne Bonny, Calamity Jane, etc), supporting players in history's more rough-and-tumble moments. That isn't the case, and I thought it might be worthwhile to highlight fifty or so of the figures who strike me as the most visually or narratively arresting so that others might not be saddled with similar preconceptions.

Today's warrior is MARIA BOCHKAREVA.

History Star Wars: Wyatt Earp & Doc Holliday

Figured I might scratch the odd Star Wars itch by drawing historical figures as Star Wars people.

This week's:
Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday!

Recent Star Wars sketches

Here are some ink and watercolor sketches that I did just before Christmas.  Star Wars!

Ewok X-Wing Pilot.  Just because they don't have advanced
technology doesn't mean they couldn't handle it.

Snowtrooper and an AT-AT (Imperial Walker) from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

dvent Calendar Day 25: Baby Jesus

Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:

https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR


Advent Calendar Day 25: Baby Jesus

Merry Christmas, friends!

Advent Calendar Day 24: La Befana

Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:

https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR



Advent Calendar Day 24: La Befana

La Befana is the Italian gift-giver, just like we get Santa Claus, the Spanish get the Three Kings, and the Austrians get Baby Jesus (he doesn’t come down the chimney; I checked).  Her original story is heartbreakingly sad, and its traditional alternative is kind of lackluster, so I’m offering a variation that marries the two.

The Three Kings, on their way to see baby Jesus, ask for shelter for the night at a rural house.  In it, La Befana (whose name derives from a mispronunciation of “Epiphany” and who probably has OCD) is busy cleaning, as she always does.  Learning that they’re taking gifts to a baby, she volunteers to go, too; her kids are grown and she’s itching to get rid of their old toys.  Following the kings, she gives Jesus the toys, delighting him, and in thanks he bestows upon her immortality and a magic hamper perpetually full of toys so that she can bring other children as much joy as she did him.  She also uses her broom to tidy up the manger for Mary.  You could eat off that floor.

La Befana now rides her broom from house to house, leaving toys for youngsters and flying up the chimney.  

Advent Calendar Day 23: Roman Soldier

Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:

https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR



Advent Calendar Day 23: Roman Soldier

There are plenty of traditional nativity characters whose inclusion is meant to foreshadow something in either Jesus’s adult life, including having a burial shroud as his swaddling and an encounter with the thieves with whom he’ll later be crucified.  To my knowledge, though, there isn’t a traditional Roman soldier character (though they do often turn up in more sprawling nativity sets with other Bethlehem denizens and are a staple of church walk-through-Bethlehem setups).

The soldier here isn’t, like you see in the walk-throughs, a fancy Roman in the lorica segmentata armor of popular imagination.  He’s a rural reserve, stuck in Bethlehem, a deputy constable in a podunk hamlet.  So his armor is the minimum a provincial soldier might be issued while still being identifiable as a Roman soldier.

Advent Calendar Day 22: The Tempter

Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:

https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR

Advent Calendar Day 22: The Tempter

The Eastern Orthodox Church has its own nativity traditions, and one of them is depicting an old shepherd dressed in animal skins.  Byzantine art pretty much always shows sad-sack Joseph sitting despondent and pouty off in a corner (just google search “Byzantine Nativity Art” and take in dozens of Josephs who make Keanu Reeves look positively jubilant by contrast).  Nature, and with it any semblance of Joseph’s paternal/husbandly authority, has been vanquished by a sexless conception, and Joseph, his world upended, doesn’t take it well.

Though there are shepherds, including old hide-wearing ones, in early nativity icons, one in particular becomes a narrative figure by the early 1300s: The Tempter, who stands next to Joseph, stoking Joseph’s doubt about Mary’s virginity.  This is either a man doing the devil’s work (though some early versions treat him instead as a man doing the Lord’s work, reminding Joseph of ancient words of Isaiah that Christians would take as prophecy regarding a virgin birth) or the devil himself in disguise.

By the mid-1300s, you see James, Joseph’s son, interceding, attempting to ward this tempter (this is also, I believe, the first usage of James in Nativity art) to save his father from doubt, or maybe to just give the really, really sad guy a little space.