Along The Draughty Corridors For Miles And Miles She Goes

So this week I finished that suprise piece I can't post for a little while still and got started on the final drawing for the print I sketched out last week. Decided on a horizontal orientation so I could have the owl's wings out.
There are a lot of things I'm still working out, like whether the smoke will be solid or translucent, and what kind of color to use. My friend's one request was that it not be too hard for him to register, and I'm still working out the kinks in making separations and easily screen printed designs for other people. I've gotten so used to using every color at my disposal it's also really hard for me to think of a limited color design (in this case paper, linework, smoke color). This will just be linework so once I get to the inking stage it should be relaxing and simple, which I'm looking forward to. The pencil drawing for black and white stuff is always way more involved than the drawings for full color things which are more like blank coloring book pages.

I think he needs more mushrooms too. The symbolism here is pretty obvious so I wont bore anyone but I've been trying to integrate regeneration and decay into pieces here and there and maybe someday I'll do a whole painting about it. It seemed appropriate when my friend requested another one of the skull faced animals for this poster.

Also check out all of these amazing mushrooms which I read about both while reading up about bioluminescence (for another project I should start soon!) and looking for mushroom pictures to reference for this drawing. I've actually spotted a few things on that site, like this stinkhorn (seriously) but would really love to see some of these biolumenscent mushrooms:
In other (appropriately skull faced animal) news I experimented with embedding something in resin for the first time this weekend and it came out really well. I have a growing collection of dessicated dead mice sent to me by my aunt (she calls them "pompeii mice") and dead bats and stuff from the warehouse where my partner works. I really have no idea what to do with them and this weekend I was given a small bottle of resin and tried it out. Here's the mouse before:
and here he is in the resin:


My favorite part which I was most concerned with preserving was the way its spine and skull are exposed and lead into whats left of the body cavity. This was actually a little tricky because when I got to the second embedding layer of resin I had to pour it into the mouse's body to keep it from floating. I got some air bubbles and he sank into the first layer of resin because it wasn't solid enough when i put him in but it mostly came out ok. I think he looks like a little pushead drawing (minus the bandages). Anyway, resin! It's pretty cool.

Also worth noting I'm going to Ireland and England this month using the money I made from that last show. So far I've been able to turn the profit from all three of my shows into a trip, which is really ideal. I've been to Ireland before but never to England, and we're doing some last minute planning so if there's anything you recommend let me know! I like neolithic stone sites, castles, skeletons and reliquaries, beautiful natural spots and grim historical stuff. I also poked around the Website for the Tate and discovered that they have a lot of stuff I'd really like to see in real life which is really exciting. I'm especially excited about these two:

William Blake-The Night of Enitharmon's Joy (formerly called `Hecate')

John William Waterhouse- The Magic Circle

Yes!