Dawn of the Phoenix

The phoenix appears up there in the sky,
His wings beat quickly as he goes up high,
The night has ended as did his life,
The day comes anew, ending all strife.

(poem was written by me, just now. xD And...strife...rhymes with life...hehe. ~_^)

I've been working on this on and off for a week or so. :) I'm really, really happy with how it turned out! This is my first watercolor in which I used no reference pictures (obviously...I mean, a phoenix doesn't exist Oo). This is my 3rd ever watercolor picture, and I think I've found my medium. ^^ Why do I like watercolors? Well, you can be messy and no one'll care. You can put down a ton of water on the page and then you can put down a dot of color, and it'll go really far! Then there's the fact that the colors are transparent, and you can change the transperency based on the amount of water you use. I :heart them. :) :)

Anyway, there are an absolute ton of symbolic meanings in this picture. There's the ankh (it's not the sign for female...), an Egyptian sign meaning eternal life, aka a phoenix. I also read that it can mean the sun rising (the loop being the sun and the horizontal line being the horizion), which I didn't know when I was painting this! Also, the idea of the phoenix rising from the flames just as the morning is beginning is symoblic. Somehow. xD There's more, but that's all I'm saying. :X Tell me what else you see!

I used my trusty watercolors, my wonderful 005 black Micron pen, and then...GOLD ACRYLIC PAINT (transparent glossy...actually, it's for sculptures ^^)! Isn't that exciting? Unfortunetly, with this scan (I took 5 scans and compiled them together), you can't see the gold. It only appears in the light. There's some on the crest, the flames, the ankhs, the talons, the beak, and a few of the feathers. But!, I took a photo for detail shots, so look at the two detail shots to see some gold: http://img193.exs.cx/img193/4954/phoenixdawndetail1.jpg and http://img170.exs.cx/img170/5728/phoenixdawndetail2.jpg . (and maybe this should be under mixed media, but I feel I used mostly paint, so...yeah. :)

Picture © me, Kat. Stealing or tracing this is against the law, and I will hunt you down. :)