I drew this way back in March, but held on to it for a long time because it was such a “summer” drawing. I saw my first truly red-orange leaves yesterday, though, and realized that time was kind of running out on anything summer-themed.
This illustration shows a gamayun, a prophetic bird-woman of Slavic folklore. She sits at the mysterious crossroads between something human, animal, and divine, like the Greco-Roman sphinx. The gamayun in particular is said to communicate divine messages, and so I contrasted her with something very simple and earthly: stalks of wheat.
She almost made it into my first round of drawings for prints, and I’m certainly not finished with her, but I wanted her to make an appearance before the end of summer!