Mythology

Baba Yaga, Pickles, and Taft

Here’s another development piece for an upcoming Doctor Baer story. Practicing drawing new characters and new vehicles!

I’ve been consuming a lot of media around the Slavic witch Baba Yaga. One of the many fascinating features of the character is she flies around in a mortar. I thought it’d be fun to try to put my own spin on the vehicle.

It started in my sketchbook:

Once I got somewhere interesting I moved to Blender and built a crude 3d model:

Which I was able to import into Clip Studio Paint and position in the perspective I wanted:

And from there I penciled overtop:

And then inking, coloring, and etc.

I’m excited to be playing with new ideas for the characters, but anxiety is starting to build. If I want to create and serialize a brand-new Doctor Baer story next year, I need to get most of the writing done before the school year starts. Come late August, I’m working full-time as a teaching artist, which means I’ll have 1.5-2 hours per day to work on this at maximum. I’ll need every one of those hours to pencil, ink, and color the pages, even with these handy 3d models.

My hope is that the deadline will force me to commit to some ideas and get some momentum going. I’ve found that’s my only ally when it comes to writing/thumbnailing. It just takes so much to get it going.

But little pieces like these give me a promise of what could be if I just put in the time to work on it!

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Baba Yaga the Ambiguous Cat Witch

Penciled in Clip Studio Paint, inked on watercolor paper, then painted in Clip Studio Paint using Ray Frenden’s terrific watercolor brushes (affiliate link).

I’ve been working on several ideas for a new Doctor Baer story, and one that’s in a third draft stage involves introducing the famous slavic witch into my animal world. This is the working design.

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of material on Slavic mythology and fairy tales, and the ambiguous witch keeps me fascinated. Neither good nor evil, she stands for the wildness of nature itself. Containing all the sublime terror and joy of participating in life. Naturally that would make her a cat in an anthropomorphic comic!

But I’ll let some of the sources I’ve been using tell her story. Here are some good listens/reads on this character and the archetype she falls into:

NSFW but lively and fun discussion on the Deviant Women podcast:

A thorough discussion on the Mythillogical Podcast:

A shorter presentation on the witch:

Another long-ish podcast from Bone & Sickle.

And here’s a terrific book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes on the wild woman archetype

She shows up as an antagonist (though they call her the Hunchback Fairy) in this 60s Russian film that I unironically adore:

And hey–here’s a cool song that teaches you about her!

Expect to see more drawings of her as I work on the story.

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Monster Market Podcast

I’m loving this podcast by my art buddies Zack Giallongo and Ben Hatke!

Each episode the hosts pick a theme regarding mythical creatures, then each shows up to discuss three of their favorites. As you can see above, a recent episode’s theme was Cunning Canines and Haunting Hounds. Fans of fairy tales, folklore, and mythology will love this show.

And they release cool art to accompany every episode:

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Marzanna (Morana) The Slavic Goddess Of Death | Slavic Mythology (4)


Marzanna or Morana is an ancient Slavic goddess associated with winter’s death and rebirth of nature. In Slavic mythology and folklore, Morana played an important role and was portrayed as a pale goddess with long dark hair and a slim figure. She was the daughter of Lada and Svarog and was prominently worshiped by the Kievan Rus.

Morana was initially viewed as a goddess of fertility and mother of all that is living. She resembled the positive sides of the Great Mother archetype just to later be shifted into an evil bringer of disease and old age. She became a goddess of long and cold winters that brought death, famine, and extreme temperatures of a deathly gaze.

Some Slavic legend states that Baba Yaga was the creation of Morana or that even Morana transformed into her. As it goes with her trickster nature, Morana was believed to transform into a girl called Marinka who tempted the hero Dobrynya.

The tradition of burning or drowning an effigy of Marzanna to celebrate the end of winter is a folk custom that survives in the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, and Slovakia.
#Marzanna #SlavicMythology #Mythology

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