Original Art Sundays no. 119: The Pirate Alphabet

The next page of A Private Myth is still giving me fits, but I think I know what's wrong now.
Meanwhile, rather than keep readers waiting indefinitely, here are some images from yet another uncompleted project.
I was working on an alphabet book based on pirates, more than a decade before the Pirates of the Caribbean films (which I rather enjoy). The book used the framework of a couple young girls gleefully talking about pirates.
Here are a couple of the pieces, done in watercolor technique using colored inks and dyes.

This piece was about Privateers, the licensed pirates of the British and Spanish crowns.
The colors are a bit off, and my control of background around people and objects was a bit lacking- still hadn't mastered masking!
And the foreground figure is a bit stiff, and the color of his coat is too close to the background sky.
So it goes.

This piece, which I much prefer, is an illustration for a page devoted to women pirates, who span all nationalities. I particularly like the one in white with the blue kerchief.
I love the subdued tones, and the interplay of inks and paper texture pleases me.
I went out of my way to get the weaponry and boats right, but I suspect I made some errors despite my best efforts.
This is another one of those "I'll go back and finish it some day" projects.  Such a big pile of those!
Then again, it may have been rendered unnecessary. The market may be glutted with pirate stuff now. More's the pity, as the relative percentage of good pirate stuff to total pirate stuff is rather low. Still, I did like the last Pirates of the Caribbean film, the one loosely based on Tim Powers' novel On Stranger Tides, even if it didn't clean up the loose plot threads from the previous film in the series.
Next week: something....

Turn and face the strange....

Okay, on Saturday I attended the Transgender Health Seminar.
I debated posting on this at all. My gender history is a matter of public record, even online, but since it's more than 20 years since I had final surgery, I often think of it as in the past. And it's not a past I'm always keen on revisiting.
Not that I don't own my history, but it's more to the point that I have other concerns in my life right now.
But concerns over having a past- any past- never go away if one is to have an authentic future.
I had a fascinating conversation with fantasy writer Tim Powers about transsexualism (what a callous, clinical term for self-actualization!). Tim said, "I imagine that it would be like learning a new language."
Well, I've spent a quarter century socializing myself as female, learning what that does and does not mean, and redefining possibilities within that on my own terms. Terms always subject to renegotiation, of course.
Everybody gets to pick and choose what parts of a societal gender stricture model they want to own. The decision is just more conscious and more blatant in my case, and it's a conversation that's been going on for so long now that I weary of it a bit.
That, and getting over my ego-driven embarrassment over association with my own kind, are the concerns that kept me away from last year's conference.
And if I'm going to be completely honest about it, I'm doing more or less okay in the world these days as far as being seen on my own terms, and I am reluctant to do anything to call that into question.
But maybe I have something to offer my gender transgressive peers, and perhaps they have something to offer me- humility, at the very least.
So Tim Powers was right, in a way. There is a language of women, and I have learned it. And now I can teach it.
But I will always speak it with an accent.
Note: the cover is from Alan Moore's Promethea #7, a surreal and tragic (in this issue, at least) superhero love story with overt gay and transgender themes. Promethea is astonishing.