The Raven

The Raven
June 10th, 2010
Charcoal on drawing paper, 24" x 17"

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted--Nevermore!
~Edgar Allan Poe

100 Themes Challenge: Variation 3
#13: Edgar Allan Poe


I guess it's obvious by now what this piece is. It's The Raven, sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas Athena. It's an older work, so I'm kind of cheating on the theme, but I think it's a pretty good piece, so I'm submitting it.

I finally borrowed my mom's digital camera and took photos of some of my bigger pieces that won't fit on my scanner. I hate cameras, though, and cameras hate me, so we'll see how well this works...

I LOVE charcoal. I love how you can just grab a chunk and attack a piece of paper with it, smudging and smearing and getting all messy. But most of all, I love the contrast I can get out of it. Yes, I love my graphite pencils, but graphite doesn't go black. The downsides to charcoal are that one, you can't put a ton of detail in it, and two, you have to work on paper too big to scan.

Since I had to take a photo of this, some of the bottom of it was cut off, but I actually like it better cropped like this. The composition works better. I didn't exactly use reference photos for this, but I did google ravens and Athena and looked at pages and pages of photos of both, so this is a combination of all of them.

Well, enjoy!

Comments and critiques are welcome!
If you decide to fave, it would be really awesome if you left a comment saying what you like and what you don't. Feedback like that makes me a better artist!