(Just a note, the title is definitely a working title. I'll probably figure out a real title for it after I've painted the damn thing.)

This is one of those sketches that flowed so organically and naturally out of my pencil that I had to wonder just where in the world it came from. I actually started with the shoulder of the male Xzeejee in the background, then somehow managed to sketch in the rest of his body without too much of a fuss. After I was done with that I sketched in the two female Xzeejees next to him about a week later, and again it went off without a hitch. I let the sketch rest for a month or two, picked it back up, and then suddenly I had the two young Xzeejees in the foreground and the beginnings of a background.

Again, I left it in the my sketchbook and almost forgot about it for a few months then rediscovered it and cleaned the sketch up.

Originally I was thinking about making this a terra cotta relief; but my sculpture teacher knew that it would be way too complex for me, and probably end up breaking since I had so many fiddly little details.

So I left it alone for a few more months, and finally picked it back up last week.

Now I'm fairly positive that I'm going to paint it over in watercolor and see how it goes. A part of me is apprehensive about "ruining" the sketch (something I'm sure many, many artists can sympathize with); that's why I've scanned the sketch in and saved it on my hard-drive. Now, if I do end up "ruining" the sketch I can always print it back out and give it another try.

As far as the subject-matter and the story, this is a sketch of a small "segment" of a Xzeejee family (since Xzeejees have rejected the "cell family" lifestyle we recognize in modern America. In this era and location, a real family usually consists of no less than five or six adults. Children aren't considered part of the family-proper until after puberty, and even then their "real" family is considered to be the one they marry into.) They live in a rather well-to-do section of a city called Pucca. The eldest male pictured, the "uncle" of the family, is an orator - while he isn't a politician himself he is connected to both the controlling upper-classes and the working classes and he acts as a mediator between the two, speaking up on issues that few others dare breech. Think of him as a sort of Xzeejee John Stewart. Right now we see him practicing a speech as he dresses himself in a mixture of the garb of upper-classmen and the working class.

The "aunts" are half-sisters (but in this society that really doesn't make much of a difference), and are both married to the man (and his brother-cousin, but more on that later.) Their birth-family are hard-working fishers and merchants, but hardly upper-class. They've been best friends since they were born, and worked hard in their mothers' (they have four) shop selling wares that their father-uncles traded for in distant lands. While "middle-class", their family's entrepreneurial attitude allowed them to procure a very good education for the children - these two studied at university to learn writing, arithmetic, geography, sociology, psychology, oration and public speaking, and then they were able to apprentice under Pucca's foremost textile artist to become well-renowned textile artists in their own right.

So what about the two younger Xzeejees? Well, the man has a brother-cousin (in this Xzeejee culture there is very little distinction between male relatives; an older male relative is called interchangeably "father" or "uncle", and a peer-male relative is interchangeably called "brother" or "cousin" - depending, of course, upon personal relationship) who is married to a woman unrelated to these two here; the two men are only about eight years apart, but the other male is older and was left with a much larger inheritance. With his inheritance the other male was able to establish himself as a sort of politician, but early on in his career he met a beautiful young woman who stole his heart. Together, those two had two children.

But Xzeejee families are big, and all adults are considered married together - so really the two children are also the children of the three adults pictured here. While the two women pictured here have no children of their own, they treat these two children as their own; raising them and teaching them when their birth-mother isn't around. For years these two women have traded off "baby-sitting" the children when their birth-mother isn't around, considering a blessing to be able to have such an intimate part in forming the next generation.

The youngest of the two - the female on he left - just had her first period a few months ago. Likewise, her brother - only ten months older than her - has also just gone through puberty. This means that they are now old enough to be a viewing-part of adult society; this is the first political dinner they have ever gone to, and tonight is the night when they will watch silently and learn how the adult world works. The girl on the left is so excited she can't contain herself, she just keeps blabbing about how excited she is to be allowed to go out with her family. Her brother reminds her that their father-uncle prefers silence while he practices.