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So, very quickly, the design built in my head. It needed to be connected to my Spirit name, The Eagle who Flies through the Heaven, so very quickly, assisted by the Ancestors, a design came of an eagle flying above the sun, with a bear paw print on the sun, and feathers hanging down from the handle strings. For the eagle, I've had an eagle poster on my wall for ages now, and have always liked that side profile of it. It's not posing, it's not perched, it's just... flying. So I made an edge-detected version of it to print (in several sizes), from which I will use to create a line drawing of the eagle for final painting. Oh, also if you want to hear it, it immediately made it into my song-a-day (YouTube).
At this point came the first of the slightly stressful parts, deciding on the final design and getting it onto the drum. I picked my favoured eagle size (ended up being the biggest one printed), and sketched out about how big I figured I'd want the sun. Ended up being more or less bang-on (lol drum), so no complaints there, had to clean up the linework a smidge, and freehanded a bear paw onto it for approximate size desire. Now, it was time for carbon paper.
Now, because real life doesn't have crisp, clear lines around everything, I ended up having to trace the eagle three or four times before nailing it down how I wanted. I had to simplify it some, made a few mistakes here and there (are those wing feathers or part of the tail?!? Looking up pictures of bald eagles online helped with that), and eventually nailed down the lines I wanted and sorted out the wing and tail and feet questions. Also the beak in that first stencil was off, thank you again online photos.
And then came the sun. We refined the linework and sun rays, and found a bear paw stencil online to trace out and modify to fit my liking. I did try to get it in the center of the sun, but it was off by like... a millimeter, so I cut it out, shaved off a mil from the one side, and taped it back in moved that smidge over, and it was golden. Next up was deciding how far to have the eagle above the sun, and once THAT was sorted out, taped the pieces of paper together, taped some carbon paper onto the back of it, and taped all of that onto the drum face (after meticulously deciding what side to have facing up, based on comfort of holding the handle beneath). And then came the slow, laborious process of going over all of my lines one more time, transferring the pattern to the drum. I had to go over that a few times to get it to transfer well, and now... the paint. Also a minor question as to whether to add some decorations around the rim of the drum to kinda fill in the empty space, but I won't really be able to tell that until after this part is painted. Thus...
With some careful brushwork, we went over all of our carbon paper lines and got the linework down, and followed that with black paint. Which I thought would be the hard part. It kinda was, literally all of the paint is the hard part. We filled in the white, then touched up the black lines that I eked over, then did the brown. And then touched up-you get the idea, this entire process was touching up the linework between and throughout everything. Been ages since I've painted not-staves, kinda... forgot about that part.
For the beak, we took just plain yellow and threw in a dash of orange, then a dose of white to that to get that kinda... spot between the eye and the beak, and a little more orange to that first beak colour to get the foot. The eye I kinda made the colour of my own eye, hazel, since it represents me. Then came the sun, just a big ol' pile of yellow. I did debate whether to fill in the triangle sun rays, but this felt nicer, leaving them kinda teepee shaped. The bear paw we took red, added a smidge of black, a touch of that eagle brown (doomslayer brown something? *checks* Doombull brown, which almost fits my aesthetic of taking scary looking things and putting them on the side of good. Also the brown that I used for the staff Bruce), and popped that into the linework.
Now, that front-facing wing, that's kinda hidden in the body there. It's dark in the poster too (thus why I had such difficulties figuring that part out for the stencil), so what can I do to make you stand out more? So after asking around (I'm pretty sure it's number 4 in there, but I want to be certain) more savvy drawing artists and painters, we ended up with... a combination of 3 and 4. The spark of ingenious testing brought about by a conversation on Discord led me to test them with cling wrap. Given the sun beneath, option 4 didn't sit well with my brain, so we initially decided on option 3. The cling wrap test I did in leather brown, but on the drum it was painted in lighter deathmage1000, or whatever that one’s called again. And, after beginning to paint that, we ended up with a bit of a combination between the two, by not making a full, solid line beneath the wing, but keeping it to the wing tips as in 3, and that fit the bill (beak?) perfectly.
Now, how to fill out the kinda emptiness around the rim of the drum. We once again did several tests, initially thinking of red circles to match with the bear paw, and then compared against triangles because the design of that in my head just looked pretty nice. However, I rejected the red dots for being too dark, and the triangles for feeling like they're trapping the eagle inside a circle, which obviously didn't fit, and then the idea to make the circles yellow dawned (lol) on me! I am The Eagle who Flies through the Heaven, the one who speaks with all Deities. What could make sense more than an eagle flying amongst a variety of suns, for all of the Deities! With that decided, we also dabbled with outlining the circles, but quickly rejected that idea, just open suns for the smaller circles looked best.
Now, it gets a little bit interesting here, because obviously I was initially pondering 8 dots (and even debating between 7 and 8 (YouTube), but inadvertantly while trying to get all of the dots equidistant from eachother, made 9 dots, not even realizing it until I was literally half done fully painting them. Now, though 8 happened to be my favourite number, that number of dots wasn't chosen for that reason, it was just 'eh, that's good looking spacing'. Now, having done 9, I've gotta say, I like that a lot more. The 7 was too sparse, but between 8 and 9, I really like that there's a circle directly above the bottom sun, it just feels better, without being sparse. The spacing is still optimal, and when I was cutting out the test circles, I had initially made 9, but then scrapped one because at the moment I was set on 8. So it was meant to be it would seem, no complaints.
And with the painting completely done, it was time for the feather fringes.
More to come once the leather stripping for the fringes arrives.
Finished x month and date
