dwollsadventures: Started out as my attempt to make D&D figures for our games. I won’t
dwollsadventures: Started out as my attempt to make D&D figures for our games. I won’t buy a 4.99 pack of 20-30 transparent pngs, I can spend like 20 hours making my own. Of course, me being me, I went back to the origins of most of them rather than taking the traditional fantasy approach. The initial theme was woodland creatures, most of whom were Greek demi-humans, like the centaur here. I… got side-tracked and shifted this into just drawing general Greek mythology “races”. So let’s talk about centaurs. They are half man and half animal, in both the literal sense and the thematic sense. Centaurs combine both the intelligence and reason of man with the physicality and irrationality of animals. Their name is a good example of that: one proposed etymology, both by modern scholars and classical authors, is “bull slayer”, from ken and tauros. Rather than farming cattle like humans, centaurs hunt them in the wild. Being a mix of man and animal they fall between the two, like a wild man. Or bigfoot. You heard it here first folks, centaurs were the Greek bigfoot. They spoke and formed tribes like men, but behaved like animals. Many myths speak to their violent, crude nature, especially the Centauromachy, where a bunch of centaurs crashed a wedding to carry off all the women, including the bride. Yet, their dichotomous nature wasn’t always destructive. Centaurs like Chiron and Pholus were great teachers and knew many wonders of the natural world. Being closer to the wild and distinct from the hustle and bustle of civilization allowed them to gain wisdom otherwise out of reach for humans. These were the exception to the rule though. For most, centaurs were savages who lived in the plains and mountains of Northern Greece, untamed and wild. Our fellow combines two pottery images from the BC’s. One has a centaur wearing the cloak of a leopard, otherwise bare, wielding a tree trunk as a weapon. Other various ones show them pelting the Lapiths with boulders picked from the ground. Despite their constituent parts being famous for their frailty (humans having no natural weapons or defenses, horses just… being horses), centaurs are stronger and sturdier than either. The weapons they use are those they find as they need them. Practicing smithing and metallurgy is out of their tool-house. However, on his back he has slung a leather pack. In it would be things actually useful to him, like roots, pestle and mortar, and ways to cure and store meat. His hair is also red. This is because, to Greek thinkers like Aristotle, red hair was a sign of barbarism, which they particularly associated with the Thracians up North. Same updated proportions for the centaur. -- source link
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