Illustration Friday - Expired

I'm so literal minded sometimes. All I could think of was an expired parking meter...which was tedious and boring to draw. Oh well...I hope I can do better next week.

Papier Maché Chinese Lion Head

Okay....this isn't a tutorial. I get too distracted when I do those. This is just something I wanted to do because my daughter really wanted a Chinese New Year Lion puppet. I still have to work on the body....but this is how I started the head.

Then I built up the forms with masking tape.

Added a layer of papier maché. I guess I should mention the real FIRST step is collecting photo reference.....and I noticed they had a shiny mirror thing in their foreheads. So I found a dome button and covered it in tinfoil.

Second layer of papier maché....and the bottom jaw....made of thin card and painted with acrylics.

The next steps were painting the paper maché once it was dry, and once the paint was dry, gluing on fake fur and sparkly fabric. Oh yeah, and making separate ears and pom pom nose decorations.

Pazyryk Tattoo Stuff

I'm collecting the old encyclopedia set, Man, Myth and Magic by Richard Cavendish printed in about 1970, and I was surprised to come across the following image in the Tattoo chapter!
Not much was written about it, except that it was from a "Siberian chief who lived in the 5th century BC."

I already had this National Geographic from 1994 which had this recent find of a mummified woman dug up in Siberia....now known as The Ice Maiden......who had this beautiful design tattooed on her arm. I was confused because I thought "How can a book from the '70s have this photo in it when they said they just found this woman in the '90s?" (I know the above photo is a very different tattoo...I just meant I didn't know that there had been other finds with tattoos prior to hers.)



After a bit of Internet research, I discovered that the original Pazyryk tattooed body was found back in 1948 on the Ukok Plateau also. The Plateau is located in Siberia, near the borders of Khazakstan, China and Russia.
I have some Northern European blood (Polish...but close enough) in my background, so I always like to think I have a connection to the Ukok Plateau

I modified the design because my left arm already had a tattoo, and I'm happy to discover that mine is facing the same way as the 1948 find. Here's how my tattoo looked when it was new...and I was a lot younger. 1995 or '96.