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So, very quickly, the design built in my head. It needed to be connected to my Spirit name, The Eagle who Flies through the Heaven, so very quickly, assisted by the Ancestors, a design came of an eagle flying above the sun, with a bear paw print on the sun, and feathers hanging down from the handle strings. For the eagle, I've had an eagle poster on my wall for ages now, and have always liked that side profile of it. It's not posing, it's not perched, it's just... flying. So I made an edge-detected version of it to print (in several sizes), from which I will use to create a line drawing of the eagle for final painting. Oh, also if you want to hear it, it immediately made it into my song-a-day (YouTube).
At this point came the first of the slightly stressful parts, deciding on the final design and getting it onto the drum. I picked my favoured eagle size (ended up being the biggest one printed), and sketched out about how big I figured I'd want the sun. Ended up being more or less bang-on (lol drum), so no complaints there, had to clean up the linework a smidge, and freehanded a bear paw onto it for approximate size desire. Now, it was time for carbon paper.
Now, because real life doesn't have crisp, clear lines around everything, I ended up having to trace the eagle three or four times before nailing it down how I wanted. I had to simplify it some, made a few mistakes here and there (are those wing feathers or part of the tail?!? Looking up pictures of bald eagles online helped with that), and eventually nailed down the lines I wanted and sorted out the wing and tail and feet questions. Also the beak in that first stencil was off, thank you again online photos.
And then came the sun. We refined the linework and sun rays, and found a bear paw stencil online to trace out and modify to fit my liking. I did try to get it in the center of the sun, but it was off by like... a millimeter, so I cut it out, shaved off a mil from the one side, and taped it back in moved that smidge over, and it was golden. Next up was deciding how far to have the eagle above the sun, and once THAT was sorted out, taped the pieces of paper together, taped some carbon paper onto the back of it, and taped all of that onto the drum face (after meticulously deciding what side to have facing up, based on comfort of holding the handle beneath). And then came the slow, laborious process of going over all of my lines one more time, transferring the pattern to the drum. I had to go over that a few times to get it to transfer well, and now... the paint. Also a minor question as to whether to add some decorations around the rim of the drum to kinda fill in the empty space, but I won't really be able to tell that until after this part is painted. Thus...
More to come once I get the paint down. Right now though, I don't want to decide on rim decorations or attach the feathers until I see the fully painted face.
Finished x month and date
