Trolls!

     Myth collecting is a hobby of mine.  There is something so personal about mythology- even hundreds or thousands of years after the story itself was inspired, mythology (of every culture) still speaks to the most primal human problems.  Reading myths, to me, feels like studying cave paintings, or being at an archeological dig... it's a direct connection to someone, somewhere lost in history, who left their mark.
     Trolls are a funny little breed, am I right? Throughout mythology they come in all sizes, all shapes, and all temperaments.  There are flesh-eating cannibal trolls, tiny mischievous trolls, huge god-like trolls, house trolls, chimney trolls, tower trolls, cave trolls, hill trolls, mountain trolls, trolls with magic, trolls without magic... it goes on and on, you get the idea.  Lots of them - pretty much any location or medium sized animal was probably attributed with a troll at some point in history, humans cannot get enough of them. Every culture has at least one version of a "troll," for good or evil, we're stuck with them.
    

     On a side note, I really need to get some better paper.. my lines keep bleeding all over the page if I'm not careful with this stock.  I'll get into it more with part 2 of this blog post later, for now I'll just leave you with Troll Pictures Part 1!  I'm off to celebrate fireworks day!  I leave you in the company of this big hunter troll, the smaller rock troll, putting up with their little, neon-haired cousin.

     *Update* Woops a whole week went by!  Such is life in the summer time.  After a few weeks, I'm back in the swing of things, and finishing up my first, full interweb comic, Far From Home, while I doodle other things in my sketchbook.  These are those other things.
     Here's the rest of the gang- that I've been turning over in my head for a while... I mean there are always more, but these are the ones that bubbled to the surface first when I started drawing. The ugly one was semi-inspired by an old show called David the Gnome, which I used to love watching as a little kid. The lighter, sketchy-looking one of them is a Kappa, a funny little kind of Japanese troll that lives underwater, has a head full of water, and will die if that water happens to slosh out by accident.  That big one on the bottom looks a little like a Totoro (which is also the Japanese word for "Troll" f.y.i.), but I'm not sure why she would be hiding under a bridge... actually, looking at it now, I know exactly what she's doing under that bridge.
     Oh and fun fact, all three of those trolls are female!

     ... but not the two tiny ones.  Those are definitely dudes.