Drawing Ravens

I’ve been thinking and writing about Ravens for almost a year.   They spend time on the farm and in my dreams. I’ve taken videos of them, watched them, and listened to them.   I’ve seen them in a landscape that comes to me between sleeping and waking.

Today I started figuring out how to draw them.  I did it by watching my videos and looking at the photos of the raven on the maple tree outside my studio.  I looked online to for photos of close-ups of their eyes.

I filled page after page of a 16×20 newsprint sketchpad with birds that eventually evolved into my raven.  I drew it until I didn’t have to think about how to make the lines that formed the shapes that became the raven.

I stopped before it became rote.

I thought of how in Bellydancing we will practice dancing to a certain song.  But we stop practicing before we know it so well, we find ourselves trying to choreograph our moves.  Like in Bellydancing, I don’t want to know the raven so well that it loses its spontaneity, its freshness.

I do have a fabric painting in mind for my raven.  I don’t have all the details down, just a vague idea of some of the elements and a few different techniques in mind to use.

I’ve been patient, waiting for the raven to come, trusting it would.   Seems that time is now.