Happy New Year with more disturbed Ladies

I had started a girls head series last year, with each of these ladies depicting a different mental process or problem, be it thoughts being on fire, keeping struggles within or having trouble to think clearly with all the mental quicksand hampering you. 

So the girl series continues, simply because I love making them and also they help me to put an image to emotions or impressions that keep coming up. They are part of a creative personal therapy process one might say.

I am starting my post off with my Hex 18 girl. I know it is a weird title, it relates to the I Ching hexagram 18: Decay/ Work on What Has Been Spoiled. 

A very good friend of mine used to make me cast some coins and derive the hexagram from that for me. I honestly don't know how many times hex 18 came up, but it must have been a good 20 times or more, and there are 64 hexagrams in total and throwing the coins is used as a sort of randomiser as to what hexagram will come up.

The first line in the text for Hex 18 tells us that it represents a bowl with worms breeding inside. It wants to tell is that there is an issue that has arisen out of conscious neglect (or procrastination) and that needs to be dealt with. Eventually I got the message and I started realising that it wasn't a pointing of fingers but a pointing out of a source of a problem I was having and so I decided to firstly deal with the Hexagram and learn about it properly, since it wanted to tell me something that badly I owed it that much at least. During this learning process my Hex 18 girl was born. Although in retrospect I have to say she is a bit of a misrepresentation of the hexagram, as the hexagram tells us to work (and repair) on what has been spoiled and so maybe another fitting image might have been a broken bowl repaired with gold as in the japanese traditional craft of Kintsugi 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

Since I made this girl and learned more about hex 18 I took the time to make a study of the I Ching as well and I have never since gotten the 18th hexagram as a result of casting my coins. I hope for now I am dealing or have dealt with the issue it was relating to.

This next girl is what can happen if I feel quite contented for a while, no major internal struggles or anything so I could devote some time to drawing a Magnolia Girl in front of a desert ghost settlement. She is a nighttime creature and so she has some moths gathering around her blossom like a living crown.

I hope you enjoyed these gorls, I have some more to post and write about but I also would like to pace myself. I haven't posted anything in half a year and I have done plenty of arting since but all the pictures are on a different device that is currently not compatible with Blogger. Until I have worked something out I have to make do with what I have but that means a lot of my projects I can not show here just yet. 

Until next time, keep arting...