I often have to go digging when you post something. Today I dug this up:
and
encounters could be dangerous, bringing dumbness, besotted infatuation, madness or stroke to the unfortunate man.
I'd feel quite unfortunate to have run across this creature of yours.
The webbing around the light is interesting, looks like sheet music in place. And what is the plaque on the vat, or well walls, around the tree? Is it a design you use elsewhere?
It was a drawing that I had already started. The woman was in front of the well and I had used some photo and AI images as layers. It didn't work so I've abandoned it. But then I wanted to see if I could save it and started doing chaotic lines making them work as cross hatching just not in any ordered way. Then I drew the the front of the well so it covered the body of the woman and suddenly it was interesting with her standing down there with the tree.
The working title them became "Odin of the southern cross" - a south american Odin lacking an eye, tied to the tree and standing in the well of Mimir. That is where the unreadble plaque is from. It was meant to have the Valknut on it, but then I reconsidered and decided to let it be that original nymph or dryad I had envisioned and let all those other ideas just be there as traces, as the thing mostly reminded me of exactly such a tree spirit as the hamadryad, with an accusing stare.
An accusing stare. That's why the creature is so unnerving.
So much goes into drawing! You put all this fascinating thought into your works, too. Then I go looking up stuff to better understand. Nice pre-coffee fare, your posts. This morning I found these:
Moreover, the valknut is said to often accompany symbols and possibly depictions of the god Odin, whose roles in Norse mythology include ferrying the dead to the afterlife.
Mimir was sent by the Aesir as a hostage to the rival gods (the Vanir), but he was decapitated and his head was returned to the Aesir. The god Odin preserved the head in herbs and gained knowledge from it. According to another story, Mimir resided by a well that stood beneath one of the roots of Yggdrasill, the world tree.
In Norse mythology, Yggdrasill is an enormous ash tree that connects the nine worlds, including the underworld (Niflheim), the earth (Midgard), and the realm of the gods (Asgard). Yggdrasill is associated with both life and death: it acts as a gallows that the god Odin hangs himself from in order to gain mystical knowledge, and it is said to be the source of new life after Ragnarök (Doomsday), the catastrophic final war of the gods.
I gotta go make some coffee. Thanks for the trip into Norse mythology. Everything I do know about it, has come to me through you.