18/100 - Alien spirit
I found the writing of Lord Dunsany when I was a teenager and his mythological fantasy really hit a chord in me. I had no idea one could invent gods and their stories, who in their right mind would give someone permission to do such a thing?
But I guess having a name such as Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany will give you permission to do about anything. I was no baron in my early years (unless you count my other fantasies of being a free boy living like The Baron in the Trees) but I gave this myth making business a try and wrote some sappy pages about a princess, some arcane gods and a knight-astronaut, and oh my god, what a cloying mess I made. Some years later I read a version of it at a writing workshop and received a well deserved verbal spanking. I'm really not ashamed, I still think copying things you like is a legitimate way of learning, and most of the time you just end up with bad copies.
And then there is the issue of trying to copy and influencer of influencers. The lineage of storytellers influenced by Lord Dunsany pretty much covers all the bases of fantasy today, so even without recognizing names like H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke or Neil Gaiman, there seems to be a bit Dunsany in every piece or fantasy we consume.
When I read The Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman I had exactly the same reaction: who gave you permission to do this? To pick gods from other cultures and have them interact in the same story, to bake new gods from scratch?
The best answer I have is that you don't need permission. You give yourself permission, it is our right as members of a god inventing species.
The reason I'm telling you all this is that I keep on drawing these characters I think of as gods and spirits in my own mythology. Sometimes I just draw them without giving it much thought anymore, and some of them keep on appearing despite my efforts to draw something else. The one in the picture is an example of that. Sometimes I think it has been plucked out of the Dunsany-Lovecraft-Borges continuum, and sometimes it feels like an obsessive glitch of my own hand-mind.
In any way, I'm just giving myself permission to keep on drawing.
My alien spirit is 2.75" by 3.5" and it can be your alien spirit too(sold).