Honey Badger Madness

honey badger don't care

My friends have recently become a tad obsessed with the honey badger, because of a certain (nsfw) video. After lots of emailing it was decided we needed a honey badger banner for this year's La Prova Dura, because that event is all about the pageantry and another banner never hurt, eh?

my first banner, drying on the frame

Well I'm brand spankin' new to banner painting. I've done one previously, and that experience was awesome and I fell in love completely! The cool thing about banner painting is that it's very similar to watercolor and tattoo flash,  both of which I happen to have experience in. The only funky part about banners is the gutta, which is like a wax resist and keeps the dye or paint from seeping into areas it shouldn't be seeping. It's goopy and takes practice getting used to.

So! Back to badgers. If you watched the video I linked above, you'll know that honey badgers EAT cobras! What better design for a honey badger banner than one fighting and eating a cobra? I played around with it and came up with what you saw at the beginning of this post. To get it on the silk, I just drew the design with black marker on a large pad of paper, placed the silk over it and traced carefully with pencil.

gutta drying takes forever when it's rainy outside

I don't have a frame specifically for banner painting yet, so I stretched the silk over the back of a canvas I have lying around, and stuck pushpins into the wood of the frame to keep it taut. The gutta took ages to dry, but I happened to be working on this project when it had been raining for weeks and there was a lot of moisture in the air.

the lines above the badger's head are books, not a problem with the dye

They dying part is pretty straight forward. I used several different brushes since I'm still trying to get a feel for this medium. By dipping a brush in the red dye and tapping it against my hand I got the blood splatter effect, which hopefully makes their fight look more violent, instead of like a mistake I made with the paint!

see? books!

Since the air was so wet, as soon as the banner was dry enough to touch I took it off the frame and hung it up as shown above. I let it stay there for a few days before I put it in the dryer on high for an hour to treat it. I still need to sew ties on one side so it can be flown from a pole, but it should make an appearance next weekend at Prova!

This is a small, favor sized piece I did for the lovely Isolte, so she can give it to a friend.