Any artists out there?

[black_cat]

I'm really excited for "carvings". There's SO many directions you could go with it. Did you know that elephants actually carve caves in cliff walls while looking for salt? That could be a cool picture. Or just like.... Straight up just doing a study of David.

Good point. I didn't know that about elephants! That's super cool.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

I figured, but I guess it's just important to remember that what we think is spooky isn't what they think is spooky? Like some people are like "ancestor spirits sound an awful lot like GHOOOOOSTS... LINGERING SPIRITS OF THE DEAD...", and it's like..... Not really? There's nothing scary about that at all.
So like... Wendigo = Maybe spooky? Certainly non indigenous people think so. But also maybe just a really damaged person. Hard to say unless you grew up with it.

 

[black_cat]

I was looking into it and found something called a skinwalker....a harmful witch from Navajo folklore that has the ability to shapeshift into animals. Googled it....bad idea. Very creepy.

Spoiler: Warning-Creepy Pic (no gore but pretty distorted, just pretty unsettling)

 

[black_cat]

I figured, but I guess it's just important to remember that what we think is spooky isn't what they think is spooky? Like some people are like "ancestor spirits sound an awful lot like GHOOOOOSTS... LINGERING SPIRITS OF THE DEAD...", and it's like..... Not really? There's nothing scary about that at all.
So like... Wendigo = Maybe spooky? Certainly non indigenous people think so. But also maybe just a really damaged person. Hard to say unless you grew up with it.

Yep! I'm going to make sure to look pretty far into it. I don't actually know what a Wendigo is....but 'ancestor spirits' definitely = not spooky.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

I was looking into it and found something called a skinwalker....a harmful witch from Navajo folklore that has the ability to shapeshift into animals. Googled it....bad idea. Very creepy.

Spoiler: Warning-Creepy Pic (no gore but pretty distorted, just pretty unsettling)

View attachment 2318598

Did you read the wiki page on it? Seems like it would be hard to depict. Seems like most "spooky" depictions are non-native. (Including this picture.)

 

[black_cat]

Did you read the wiki page on it? Seems like it would be hard to depict. Seems like most "spooky" depictions are non-native. (Including this picture.)

Yep....just using it as an example of something that's considered bad in the folklore, not just to outsiders. I"ll do some more looking.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

That's true. Wendigos are the same. In folklore they're evil spirits that possess people and cause them to become cannibals. It usually resulted in exile or trying to banish the spirit so aggressively sometimes you died. It's also used to describe people consumed by greed and destruction. So, they're bad, but they're not a monster exactly. It's considered more like a form of psychosis or illness.

In western depictions they're like... Rotting deer-horned golems that scream. Sometimes they look like yetis. They have nothing to do with the actual folklore.

Native people usually see the whole 'the real monsters are us' thing more than... Literal monsters. It's very cool IMO.

 

[black_cat]

That's true. Wendigos are the same. In folklore they're evil spirits that possess people and cause them to become cannibals. It usually resulted in exile or trying to banish the spirit so aggressively sometimes you died. It's also used to describe people consumed by greed and destruction. So, they're bad, but they're not a monster exactly. It's considered more like a form of psychosis or illness.

In western depictions they're like... Rotting deer-horned golems that scream. Sometimes they look like yetis. They have nothing to do with the actual folklore.

Native people usually see the whole 'the real monsters are us' thing more than... Literal monsters. It's very cool IMO.

Wow, that is cool. Not cool for my drawings, but cool in general. Where did Rotting deer horned golems that scream even come from?

 

[Amer]

Your art is very good. The chick in my profile I painted with acrylics. I love art and raising my chickens.

Awww! It’s so cute!

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Basically since Native Americans don't have a lot of "monsters" people just kind of superimposed their own westernish ideas of what a Wendigo must be onto some rumors, kind of like they did with skinwalkers.
The first non-indigenous record of it is a kind of HP lovecraft unspeakable horror mystery monster you never see. Then some other folks like him wrote stories about the "wendigo" which I guess kind of sounds like "wind-igo" and is sort of associated with being cold, and they wrote about it being an air elemental and would smell or make shrieking wind noises. He basically said that Native Americans sacrificed human beings to it and cast devil summoning spells. (Which is some nonsense garbage and part of why natives hate being associated with witchcraft.) It's mostly non-described in there too, but gives the idea of a skull floating in the ether and it being a wind elemental.

Later, Stephen King put it into a book where he described it as having ram horns and later a movie, Pet Semetary, and he made this monster out of sticks and a deer skull. Which popularized that idea. But he just made it all up based on something else someone just kind of made up, with no basis in the original folklore.

And the yeti-like idea comes largely from it being a wind elemental with a big skull and using those as a jumping off point in comic books, which also spread to japan so they appear in a lot of videogames as a yeti-golem-thing.