So, obviously I love ravens. Talk to them when we are out on the trails. Ravens have the most amazing vocal range of any bird I know of, if you hear an odd sound in the woods and can't tell what it may be, chances are it is a raven. I have always worked mainly in ink and no subject seems as perfectly intended by nature to be represented by black ink on white paper as a raven against a snowy sky.

One of my most positively received and re-occuring images is the human skeleton within a raven designs. The story behind this idea is telling of my artistic process as a whole, no major peak of inspiration, I was just being lazy. 

I was moving into the shoulder on a project that wound up being almost a full suit on a good friend of mine. We had started at the left wrist with a band of rabbit and raven skulls with three birch trees growing up the forearm to a whole murder of ravens swooping around. I was getting bored with layering in all the ink to tattoo these ravens and was looking for a way to lighten up the design when the idea of putting human skeletons inside struck me. It would be visually arresting, and it would simplify the tattoo process immensely.

I drew up some designs, showed Jon and he loved them. We started inking the shoulder the next day. 

As it turns out, when I started to do woodcuts, the raven/skeleton concept lent itself just as readily to that medium as it had to tattoo. I was asked by the local alternative weekly, Anchorage Press, to desgin a print for their (2014?) Halloween cover and this was the result. Recently I got a wild hair about doing a whole series of raven/skeletons on seperate individual blocks so I could print them indepedently of each other or combine them in all sorts of compositions. So far I got 5 blocks into a planned 6 block series but have kinda given up on the 6th block. Five seems like enough. I think I will use them to print prayer flags, stay tuned. 

The original tattoo is still ongoing, the wearer lives in Ireland now, so we rarely get together for an ink session these days, but we still talk on the phone and plan out the next stage, almost a decade after we started.