Called back to the Ba

This week we continue the struggle to make something coherent from this Ba bird idea, and - I've changed my mind pretty comprehensively on how it should look.  I decided at the end of the last blog that the original is too big, the body too elongated, and that it must conform more to the proportions of a bird.  I said that I would base the bird body on that of an Egyptian wagtail, but now I've begun to doubt that choice.

There are all kinds of needless things that you can worry about with this sort of thing, and one of the worries I continually trouble myself with is ' is it authentic, is it accurate?'  In fact it doesn't matter at all, but now I began to ask, 'what kind of bird was it that the Egyptians really used?'

I think I mentioned last week that they used a variety of birds such as stalks and falcons, but I now found myself going back onto the internet to search through all the Egyptian images of the Ba bird available.  And the answer is that mostly they seem to be hawks - falcons in fact.  Some depict a very long legged bird that I took to be an Ibis, but the colour the Egyptians show the bird seems darker than that of the actual bird.  It might of course be one of those birds that change their plumage at different times of the year - and there you are, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The basic shape of your basic Ba bird.

So I have gone back to the Egyptian work and trust the original source.  They worked out how to make this crazy idea make some visual sense and so I now accept that my Ba bird will have the appearance of a falcon, and I dutifully sourced some good photos of falcons that showed me not only the size and proportions but also the feather formation. But another problem is looming on the horizon, the arms.  I can see they're going to be awkward because of where they emerge from the body of the bird, but they are an important part of this characters appearance.

That struggle is yet to come however, as next I'll concentrate on the wings, using a reference as a guide for the size and shape of the feathers that change in size as they go down a bird's wing.  The wings of the peregrine  falcon are a bluish grey with soft almost metallic effect light grey edges to each feather so blending and softening the hard edges of the lines I use is important.
 

Starting the task of placing in the feathers.

 The feathers have almost a tessellated look to them which is important to get right at the start, so that the pattern can continue correctly.  Another minor problem is understanding how the wings of the bird fold together, but artists are past masters at faking this kind of thing, and if there's something they don't understand they put it in shadow or blend it into something near, but only when they judge that they can get away with it.

Most of the feathers in, and some of the black marks on the breast and legs.

It's in the blessed knowledge of my fellow human's ignorance that I can fake the way the wings actually come together at the end of the tail, and be happy with the percentage of bird mad experts who will spot the discrepancies right away.  And now I can start on the peculiar patterns the falcon has on its chest and legs, strange cross like striations of black that cover all the light parts.

The subject through it's different stages.  Click on the image to see it slightly bigger.

The downright 'oddness' of this subject is not lost on me, in fact it's one of the things that drew me to it but putting the elements of bird and human together in a more realistic way then any ancient Egyptian would have done has thrown up a lot of problems.  The slow progress has even underlined for me what a dull image I've made of it, without even a turn of the head in a dramatic posture to relieve the boredom.  I could have chosen something more dynamic to do with the wings for instance.   But you begin with an 'interior' vision of what you want and work towards it, and sometimes you become fixated on an idea without re-evaluating enough.

Next week - those dreaded arms!

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Gods and Monsters: Developing an idea 3.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/   Mary Harrsch – photo of Ba bird.

 Like politicians in some failing political party that is slightly past its ‘sell by’ date, the Egyptian gods were represented by some pretty odd and wacky characters.  Some, Frankenstein like, were made from bits and bobs of animals and humans like Ammit who I mentioned last week.  Go on, you know you’ve voted for someone like that in the past.

Looking pretty strange was an obvious occupational challenge for the rulers of the afterlife, and there were lots of mysterious denizens of the Egyptian pantheon that I could choose to illustrate.  There is Sobek, a crocodile headed god, and Horus a deity in the shape of a falcon.  There was a hippopotamus headed goddess named Taweret, the goddess of childbirth, and Bes, a distinctly weird looking gentleman – chunky in build, entirely blue and with a lion’s mane.

When an Egyptian died, a number of different spirits were supposedly released, among them the Ka, the Akh and the Ba.  They all have different powers and represent aspects of the deceased; the Akh for instance represented their immortality, while the Ka was their life force or genius.  The Ba represented their character, the things that made them what they were, and is represented by a human headed bird, with human arms.  In Book Of The Dead manuscripts these Ba birds along with the other spirits are seen present at a funeral hovering near the deceased while they carry through various duties, saying prayers and spells, worshipping, and waiting for their moment to re-enter the corpse.

Ba’s were also able to re-visit our world in a variety of forms.  Recalling Anubis and his weighing of the heart, the Ba was also the poor unfortunate that had to witness this important procedure, no doubt biting its nails (remember, its got hands) as to the result.  They look cool and elegant in the manuscripts, and I might have a try at illustrating one.

 

Bast scribbles.  Left Bast examines the world - right, Bast preying.

But using Bast as my first project, I wanted to do a larger study of the head and settle on another pleasing (to me anyway) position for the arms and hands.  First I used the previous approach, black with blue outline, which I was happy with, but then using the same drawing (always on a separate layer from everything else) I gave the image colour.

I felt that the colour range that I could use should be reflected by actual animals (So green was mostly out – after all it’s a cat I’m painting not a parrot) and blue outlines notwithstanding, a reddish yellow colour set seemed the most appropriate.

 

Bast scribbles.  Figuring out posture and positioning of limbs.

Using two or three colours allows for light and shade to be applied, and therefore modelling of the surface.  So the result is a more round and three-dimensional form, but it can still be kept straightforward and simple.  The strong highlights are blended together, but have been deliberately placed fairly roughly onto the figures for a sense of spontaneity.  I colour the eye separately as I have done with all the images up to now, as the eye is a focal point in the design, always an important object in the depiction of any face.

 

Finished designs with different body postures.

That might seem an obvious thing to say, as if I were going to then say that the nose or lips were not really that important and could be left out of any portrait to save time.  I suppose its part of the design stage; the artist decides how a feature is represented, from what angle it will be seen, and how well defined the feature is.  It is possible to paint a face and have the eye be the first thing anyone sees.  Design and composition can be complex.

Bast designs comparing colours.

 Next I take the character of Anubis, and carry through a similar process, a different position of head arms and hands, this time he his holding some small jars instead of scales.  I think this new position shows him of as a jackal better than my first, he has slightly bigger ears and a longer snout, his head being almost in profile.  I’ve also given him and Bast more realistic body shapes; here he has a neck, shoulders and a tapering waist, but, as with Bast, I’ve made the design decision to leave the arms fairly ‘boneless’ so they can make fluid curving shapes around the body. 

Anubis designs colour comparison.

Here are some more design scribbles for an image of Sobek the crocodile headed god I 

Sobek scribbles.  I chose the one on the right to develop further.

 mentioned above.  Next week I will talk about this design and also experiment with CYMK colour.  As all these designs will to be printed by the print on demand company Zazzle, then this colour type becomes important, as it can affect the colours put down digitally using a RGB palette.  And so, until next week.