Drawings – Eras of Creation

There was scholar by the name of Marcus Borg whose focus for his many books was historical interpretations of sacred texts. An overall theme in a chapter of a recent book I read was how ancient communities explained where the world came from. Many of us are familiar with the Creation story from the first chapter of the Hebrew Bible: On the first day God created, etc. Borg posed the word Day may have actually been another way to say Era. To think of plants or animals being formed over several hundred or thousand years rather than a single day sort of, in my mind, marries the idea of the Creation story with Evolution.

So began my illustration of the Eras of Creation. This is a topic that is sort of easy to get carried away with so to keep some parameters, I opted for a minimalistic approach. Though there is nothing simple about the drawings, I imposed some limits on my choices: very limited colors, very limited shapes, the minimal amount of drawing to get an idea across. Below are the results of my exploration into this theme.

Below: The Beginning – A Formless Mass

Below: Era of Light & Dark

Below: Era of Separate Domes for Water & Sky

Below: Era of Land Mass, Sea, & Vegetation

Below: Era of Sun, Moon, Stars, Time

Below: Era of Avian & Sea Life

Below: Era of Creepy Crawly Things

Below: Era of People/Human Type Beings

So though some pages are a bit more involved than others, I still tried to restrain myself as much as possible and get the ideas across with economy of shape, color, etc. My two favorites are the Creepy Crawly pages and the People pages. If you look closely, you can see fossil type shapes emphasized on the Creepy Crawly page. On the human page, I chose to depict the continents of Africa and South America. The reason for this is because people/humans (or whatever the term is for what we were millions of years ago) originated in Africa and I was always intrigued by how, even now, you can see how Africa and South America were joined. They fit together like a puzzle!

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For this project I used a Stillman and Birn Softcover Epsilon Sketchbook, 5.5″ x 8.5″. For making the images, I used whatever suited the task best for that Era but, in general, I used Kuratake watercolors which are more gouache like in the way they behave. I particularly like a set of graphite colors they make. Additionally I used traditional transparent watercolor, gel and pigma micron pens, and some fountain pen ink. If you have a question on one particular image please feel free to contact me or ask in the comment section of the blog.