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Earth Diver Beetle Illustration

2016, Ecoline (Liquid Watercolour) and Fineliner Pen

“Earth Diver Beetle” was originally created to accompany a blog post on “Beetles in the form of Creation”. This blog article is part of a larger on going project about symbolism throughout different cultures.

“Earth Diver Beetle” was inspired by creation myths from Ancient Egypt, The Indian Tribe of Garo, the Native American Cherokee Tribe and the Chaco Tribe of South America.

You can read the full “Beetles in the form of Creation” article here on my blog.

More about my blog project…

For a long time now, I have been very interested in iconography. It is the idea that a subject is actually symbolic of something else. This subject can be an animal in a painting, a plant used by a character in a book, a colour worn by someone in a comic and so on. My main interest in this subject started when I studied Art History at High School in New Zealand. I had Iconography for a large amount of the year and one of the periods in history we concentrated on was the Renaissance in Florence which was fascinating! As I am an illustrator by profession, I like to use my knowledge of iconography to add extra meaning to my images. Something that I discovered while researching iconography is that books, websites and other resources mainly base their databases on the analyser’s perspective: all of the lists start with the subject and everything it can be symbolic of. This of course is great if you’re wondering why there is a lamb in a painting, but if you want to create an image representing sacrifice (for example) this can make your research a bit more difficult. The fact that I haven’t found a database that is more concentrated on the creator opposed to the analyser is the reason why I have started this “Meaning to Symbol” section in my blog. So whether you are simply interested in iconography or wish to add more meaning to your imagery please take a look through my database.