Stargazers.... right?

Naw. Just some random stuff.

Oh wow. Really nice. Drum and gourd ladle. Any particular legend or just something that fell out of your brain onto the paper via Tom Waits?

Lower puppy...This is just an IMHO but if the image were a bit longer top to bottom, moving it right an inch or so and down slightly would, I think, improve the flow of the layout a bit...Say if the ladle intersected around its neck instead of midback. That'd bring the flow of the linework up from feet to neck, head and then into the 'curve' of the drum IMHO.

Still, looks quite nice as it is and love the subject matter.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Kind of an incoherent mix of several legends. There's an Inuit moon-deity, Tarqeq, who's always accompanied by two dogs. And then in Eliade's book on shamanism, he was talking about how some maritime people will view the shaman's drum as a boat to navigate across the sky (unlike other people who'll see the drum as a symbolic world-tree, reindeer or horse). The ladle is this Asian design for pouring kumiss, where one scoop pours out for the physical world and the other pours out for the spirits.

I'd heard of the shaman's-drum-as-boat before but never the koumiss ladle! And Inuit folklore is one of the few I know almost nothing about.

Nifty stuff. Nice synthesis!

I like this very much.
It has a good fairy tale feel to it.

Thanks. :)

this is an incredibly cool concept, and I love the angle you chose.

Thank you!

too cool for words!

Thank you!

Oh this is awesome!

Man, I would have this as a print on my wall. What an image to conjure with!

I have a file of Stuff I Have To Put In A Game Someday, and it's full of your pictures xD

Thank you! That's quite the compliment.

I admire this style of mask, i like the rendition here, and how you tied it to the rest of the symbolism. I take it that's a drum the figure is riding on?

Yep! I'd been reading Mircea Eliade's book on shamanism. He talks about the Chukchi used to view drums as boats the shaman uses to paddle through the world (more inland people usually believe the drums are metaphorical horses, or trees). The mask is much more Inupiak/Yupik (?) in style.