Мира и Цветок | © 2012 Keelan Rosa | Digital | $10.44
The title translates to ‘Mira and the Flower’. Unless you use a proper translator, in which case it will likely come out ‘Peace and the Flower’. As ludicrous as it is for some US-born US-living primarily-English-speaking artist to title works in Russian, i got their names from Russian and it strikes me as equally ludicrous to leave the rest of the title in English and leave it as though Mira and Voda are exotic names and not just Russian for ‘world’ and ‘water’.
As for how these element-spirits ended up with Russian names (beyond US-born US-living primarily-English-speaking artist wanting to put their high-school Russian to good use), ‘мир’ (or ‘мира’ – because Russian grammar, that’s why), is simply my favourite word in any language. Your standard computerised translator will usually spit it out as ‘peace’, but it also translates as ‘world’. So ‘world peace’ comes out ‘мир во всем мире’ – literally ‘mir in all the mir‘.
Basically, it’s a total hippie word and i was looking for an excuse to use it to name someone.
Admittedly, ‘мир’ itself doesn’t really directly translate to ‘earth’, but ‘земной мир’ (‘terrestrial earth’) can apply. Maybe. …All right, it’s a bit of a stretch, if i wanted a proper element name instead of a planet name i ought to have gone with something like ‘почва/Pochva’.
I claim artistic license.
(‘Plamya’ almost ended up being ‘Ptitsa’, literally ‘bird’ and short for ‘жар птица’, ‘fire-bird’, so all things considered Mira actually has a pretty good connection between her name and her identity.)
Мира и Цветок | © 2012 Keelan Rosa | Pencil + Digital
There was much messing around with the art on this one. I was mostly experimenting with shading and facial expression for the pencil art, and while i do like how her facial expression came out in the pencils i wanted something a bit more analytical for the finished version. And then i figured if i’m going to experiment with shading in the pencils i may as well get back to toning my inks, too. (Damn, i miss toning. There’s going to be quite a bit of little toned drawings until i get the hang of doing full pictures again.)
Original pencil art available for $15 | Digital print available starting at $10.44