Time-lapse: drawing of a burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia)
I'm used to draw dark and occultism-related art, but my earlier attempts on sharing my artworks on Fediverse (which includes this community) ended up invisible/hidden, perhaps due to how I flagged these as "sensitive content" (so these ended up hidden even for myself because I don't use Lemmy as my Fediverse platform).
Now, I've drawn something more "family friendly" (albeit still heavily symbolic, at least to me): it's meant to be a burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia). Partly because it's a species with with I'm quite fascinated, partly because I can't help but notice how human artistic corpora often overlooks this specific species and genus of owls.
Any image Web search and/or artistic depictions of "owl" mostly revolves around the "ideal owl", the kind of owl many people can visually think of, which often have heart-shaped faces (a trait from Tytonidae family, aka barn-owls) and/or horn-like ears/tufts (common for owls such as those from Bubo genus aka horned/eagle-owls)... however, none of these famous "owl traits" occur on Athene genus.
Nesting behavior and size is also among the trait differences: the Athene cunicularia, specifically, nest on burrows (either dug by themselves or dug by other animals), and the genus as a whole are pretty small compared to other genera, measuring 23cm on average (some other genera of small owls are Micrathene, to which the elf owl belongs, and Glaucidium, to which the pygmy owl belongs).
Niche and over-specific knowledge, indeed, but when art is a phenomenal window to the noumenal, the signified made signifier, knowing about the signifier is important, at least IMHO.
Anyways, it's an(other) attempt of drawing this specific species from scratch. I used "PENUP" app to draw it, recording the time-lapse from within there. As I'm used to draw using Sketchbook, it may not have the same quality observed from my other drawings, because color palettes, brushes and features differ across both apps.
(Trivia: as I sometimes do across my posts, there's a hidden message above, hence why the paragraphs may sound "odd"...)
