Falcon Travelers

Over at Sandee & Amelie’s Steampunk challenges, challenge No2 is about bringing fairytales into the steampunk world. I love fairytales and I love steampunk. I think the two go wonderfully together.

I immediately thought about a fairytale I loved hearing when I was a child, The Nightingale, by Hans Christian Anderson. I think it is inherently steampunk. Steampunk before steampunk.

I started by glueing several pages together in the booklet. Which didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, as the paper is very thin. I first used a wet glue to glue them together, but later I switched to a glue stick, as this seemed to stop the paper from wrinkling. Though I like a good wrinkle every now and again, I would liked some straight pages as well.

 I then saw some swirly bits in the gesso that made me think of a large swirly tail. So I added the tail, again struggling with the bumpy bits.

I coloured the bird in with silver and gold pens and drew the rivets. Then changed my mind and used my new pigment inks to dab some teal and olive green with my fingers onto the birdy. After which I had to do all the lines and rivets again, since the pigments inks are rather opague. I added some gold emobossing and had to do the lines again. Worked in some shadowing…and, you  guessed it, had to do the lines again…

I added the gears, some chinese houses into “the hills” on the horizon, some stamping and a quote from Hans Christian Anderson. “Just Living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.” Then, of course, I had to write over the letters of the quote, because I treated those with the pigment inks as well.

Thank you all for watching and have a nice day.