I am happy to bring you green, fluffy joy 💚

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For this piece, I studied the figurative pieces from Cueva de las Manos in Argentina (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_d...) and the Gwion Gwion rock paintings of Western Australia (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_G...).

I didn't have access to raw ochre for this painting. Instead, I chipped off pieces of my red and orange pastel chalk, ground them into powder, and mixed it with bacon lard.

Prehistoric artists made paints with pigments from their evironment. The most common were charcoal and ochre, which is why cave paintings are usually black or orange, red or yellow. They crushed the pigments and mixed them with animal fat to make paints (edu.rsc.org/resources/pr...).

Cave paintings are a prehistoric painting tradition and one of the oldest forms of human art. These were made on rocks around the world with great variety between cultures. The oldest known figurative cave paintings are 40,000 to 50,000 years old (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_pa...).

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If you'd like to keep up with news from Ukraine or donate, you can find resources through United24 (u24.gov.ua) and the European Commission (commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-so...).

Pysanky are made with wax and dye. Wax is put in a tool called a kistka and then heated. You write on the egg with melted wax, then dye the egg. The waxed areas won't be dyed. This is repeated for each color, then the wax is removed to reveal the design (www.instructables.com/Pysanky-Ukra...).

It is not known how old this tradition is because egg shells don't preserve well. There is some archeological evidence that pysanky may be as old as 5000 to 2000 BCE, since a ceramic pysanky was found from this time period (www.pysanky.info/History/Anci...).

Pysanky is an ancient Ukranian egg decorating tradition. The word "pysanky" (or "pysanka" in the singular form) comes from the word for writing, so it's correct to say that you write these eggs instead of saying that you paint them (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_dec...).

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Here is a cropped version of the piece:

To make this illustration, I studied some of the illustrations in The Papyrus of Ani (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus...). I can't read hieroglyphics, so I used this resource (www.attalus.org/egypt/transl...) to transliterate Lorem ipsum (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_i...) into phonetic symbols.

The text was in Hieroglyphic script. It could be written horizontally or in columns, right to left or left to right. The direction the symbols are facing is the direction you start from. The text here is facing right, so it is read from right to left (www.egyptianhieroglyphs.net/egyptian-hie...).