Lots o' Ink

This afternoon I finished a drawing I'd been working on for the past couple of weeks. It's loosely based around a scene from The Name of the Wind and related in spirit to Des Fischer's Liebesglück--a beautiful song by Franz Schubert I'd heard performed on a couple of recitals this past school year. In sum, I was inspired by the thought of going out over a still body of water on a clear night, seeing the stars reflected on its surface below, and being able to feel for a moment as if I were floating above the universe--suspended between two limitless fields of starlight...

I did it in sharpie and pencil on white paper...yes, that's right...everything that's black I had to painstakingly color in with marker, trying desperately to avoid blotting out the symmetrically reflected stars or cross over any of the other myriad tiny white lines...and it took me FOREVER!

***And for the astronomy buffs who occasionally read my posts: no, I did not try to duplicate the night sky as seen from planet earth. And rather than apologize for my laziness, I'll explain instead that the two characters depicted are from another planet--from a totally different galaxy in fact (an irregular one too judging by the looks of things)--where miraculously another species has evolved to appear and behave in an amazingly humanlike manner...an idea that's not really so far fetched coming from someone raised on Star Trek.