Day 10: Water

Day ten's assignment is to use water as your medium or inspiration, but why not both? The idea of pure water as a medium sounded interesting, and initially I thought why not draw directly with water on some hard, resistant surface? I have a black sketchbook with plastic still on one cover, so I got a glass of water and a brush, and started pooling the water and trying to draw it into shapes... but I really don't recommend this method.
One pool of water in the lap later, I decided to paint with water on actual paper. Much better results, as you can see. What's even more interesting to me is the way the first-drawn shapes fade and vanish as the water dries.

Water, whales, it all goes together with this book, 'Deep Wizardry', which I first read in my Freshman year of High School, I think. This is actually the second book in a series, and I read them in order, but at the time my school library only had the first three, or possibly that's all that were written then. The series follows two kids (pre-teens?) who discover manuals to becoming wizards, and tumble into a whole hidden network of wizards that way. These people live like anybody else, for the most part, but also use their powers to maintain the balance of the world against the forces of destruction and entropy. The concepts in the book are nicely more complicated than good or evil, and are the kind of shades of grey that still resonate with me as an adult. I'll admit it though, this book struck me just about the time I was also obsessed with whales. The wizards of the world are not, as it turns out, all human. In this story the main characters temporarily take the shapes of whales to join whale wizards in the performing of an important ritual to keep the balance of the forces in their world, and there's some subtle hints at how interconnected the ocean is to everything else on earth. If the balance falters there, it's just the start of a chain reaction that would affect everything and everyone else.
It's a book well worth reading at any age.