“It’s all in your head; you just have no idea how big your head is.” – Lon Milo Duquette
In certain magical operations that I have been doing regularly, it is useful to visualize yourself as bigger than the entire universe. So I did a drawing of Soror Fututum Stella to help me solidify this feeling.
Twin is a sentient black hole. (She) would prefer not to eat you, but if (she) suddenly starts feeling very downhill from you, it is a good idea to be on your best behavior.
In (her) retirement (she) has developed a bit of a drinking habit.
(Today I read some discussion of MUDs and found myself thinking about the SF furry RP MUCK Puzzlebox, where Twin manifested a little after the turn of the century. Later on I ended up living with Puzzlebox’s head wizards, and am pretty much married to one of them at this point. My life would have been very different without being bent around Twin’s presence. So I decided to draw (her) and this is what came out.)
(Also fwiw, Twin generally shapes (her) event horizon into a form that is functionally neuter, but socially femme. Hence the parenthetical pronouns.)
Illustrator, about 1h.
night sky star shine
evening slow and long
incense out, swirl and ponder
see what shapes become
So lately I’ve been doodling this jackal lady with stars in her hair and her fur, and snakes in her heart and soul. She might be me. She might not be me. I haven’t decided.
Tonight I idly looked at Deviantart and pondered their current contest/advertising campaign, where one is asked to draw an “Art-vatar”: “an artistic alter ego that uses unconventional tools for their masterpiece”. And for once, the whim took me to actually do this. Two hours of fiddling around in Illustrator later, this came out.
She is currently known as Soror Fututum Stella, and all the other drawings of her so far are pretty smutty.
I have been commissioned to do a set of illustrations of the dragonsonas of the angels one calls upon during the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, if one is a neophyte in a magical system derived from the Golden Dawn documents. This is the second one. There will be at least two more.
Gabriel is the Lord of Paradise, the Serpents, and the Cherubim. She rules the Water signs of the Zodiac, and is the angel of the purple sphere of Yesod on the Tree of Life. She is helpful in matters of emotional healing, finding love and peace, finding strength in the middle chaos, and gaining insight through both dreams and one’s Third Eye.
She carries a chalice, so as to remind you that this direction is associated with the suit of Cups.
Her nametag, if you look at it from another angle, may show names like Nyx or Nut or Luna or perhaps even Hecate. And without the overlay of the Water of the South she is purple, silver, and black.
(Note: Safari and Chrome don’t seem to want to display her colors with the proper intense blue. Firefox does. Perhaps someday I will find the proper color profile incantations to remedy this without bloating this from about 400k to 700k in the process. In the meantime, if you want this to properly massage your visual cortex, then look at it on Firefox.)
I was feeling a little blocked on this for a while. Until the day when I got a little baked, did the morning Lesser Invocation Of The Pentagram, and asked Gabriel to hang out and help inspire me to finish this. On a Monday. Which is… the day associated with the Moon, and thus the best day for doing magic connected with it, according to all my books. And time sure did fly while I was going from “this is just plain wrong and I will never finish it” to “time flew by and now it’s done and makes me really happy”. There’s a few tweaks to this image I might want to make before I call this whole set done, but she feels more than sufficiently complete for now.
I just finished this commission that’s been lingering all month. Hooray!
Noelle is a very good pony who enjoys taking opportunities to let other people tell her what to do and think. It’s a nice break from reality.
And here’s the horny commissions I did over the past month. I get the most beautifully strange jobs sometimes.
Here’s some of the stuff I drew in exchange for money over the last month.
This is a caricature of Matthew “Troubadork” Legare, enthusiastically performing Comedy And Music and maybe even Comedy Music at the Renfest. The hat is based on one he has in reality.
Don’t you just hate it when you find a gorgeously-decorated bottle that turns out to be an empty genie bottle when you finally get it open? And then suddenly it’s full of genie, which is to say full of you?
Wait, I mean love. Who wouldn’t enjoy getting turned into a gorgeous genie with the power to grant anyone’s wishes they wanted?
I have been commissioned to do a set of illustrations of the dragonsonas of the angels one calls upon during the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, if one is a neophyte in a magical system derived from the Golden Dawn documents. This is the first one. There will be at least three more.
Raphael is the Lord of the Spirits of Man. He rules the Air signs of the zodiac, and is also the angel of the golden sphere of Tiphareth in the middle of the Tree of Life. He is helpful in matters of transmitting ideas, safe travels, healing, and the intellect.
He carries a caudceus, despite this direction, element, and color scheme being associated with the Tarot suit of Swords.
If you look at him from the right angle sometimes he has a hat that looks like a pie-plate with wings on it, and a nametag that says “HELLO MY NAME IS HERMES”, with the name crossed out and RAPHAEL written below it. Whenever I ask him about it, he just waggles his eyebrows suggestively and makes the Sign of Harpocrates at me. Sometimes he makes suggestive gestures with his caudceus, too. Maybe you’ll get a straighter answer out of him. Ask him about that caudceus while you’re at it, he’ll probably make some interesting reading material start showing up in your life regarding the snakes that snooze deep inside you.
So I was sitting around late at night, a little stoned, reading some books of ceremonial magic, when something in the back of my head sat up and said “hey, you should draw Anubis”. And, well. I mostly did. Sorta:
Hermanubis is a Greek deity who is somewhere in the space between Hermes and Anubis in their roles as psychopomps, which is a fancy word for “the nice guy who shows up after you die and gently leads you to the underworld”.
Both of them have other jobs – Hermes deals with commerce, transmission of knowledge, speed, travel, thieves, and sleep, while Anubis is a bit more focused, with responsibilities like ruling the land of the dead before his brother Osiris took over, mummification, and presiding over the judgement of your soul. But Hermanubis is where they blur together into one slightly saucy jackal dude, who definitely shines with the dark light of the Underworld rather than the bright light of Divine Knowledge. He’s still a beacon, though.
Illustrator, one hour, no sketch. I should try to get this printed on very deep blue card in gold.
According to my file dates and names, I built this version of my website in 2011. Visually, it remained pretty much unchanged – I built a few new styles for the various comics, but largely I just changed it by writing new blog posts and uploading pictures and comic pages.
Today, I found myself suddenly compelled to sit at some picnic tables under a highway overpass in City Park (this is much nicer than it sounds, trust me) and work on a new front page image.
I chose to keep it similar to the old one:
…but holy crap it’s a lot more detailed and fluid. And it probably took less time to do, too. The new one took about an hour and a half, plus some more time digging up my old CSS toolchain and changing the rest of the website’s colors to match. (Hooray for CSS pre-processors.) I’ve got no idea how long the old one took, but I have a vague memory of struggling with that under-chin angle on the face. This time I just knocked it out quickly, and came back for one brief touch-up near the end; I think I mostly spent my time fooling around with more detailed takes on the caduceus, and deciding how frilly to make the big swath of hair. Also this one, like, kind of actually looks like me, if you ignore the fact that I sure as hell do not have that kind of ass, damn. If only.
I guess I’ve changed elemental associations from Fire to Air or something? I have no idea what that will mean for the future. Maybe I’ll be back here in another decade or so with a new take on this.
Anyway. If you wanna see it in its full glory then go visit the front page of my site.