PORTRAITS BY RACHAEL ROSSMAN

Unique watercolor portraits and pet portraits as seen on dooce.com, marthastewart.com and The Pioneer Woman. Commissions gladly accepted.

I’m Painting Spirit Animals Over Here!

TigressSpirit animal. Power animal. Totem. By any name, it is a physical representation of the traits and skills that you are supposed to learn or nurture in your life’s journey. My power animal (PA for short) is Tiger and I know this because I have a friend who is a shaman. (Yeah, I hang with shamans. Everyone should!) During my journey she actually asked Spirit a few times if Tiger was accurate because it was so cliché. That’s how you know you’ve got a good spirit talker. She’s like, “Hold up. Tiger? For real?” It’s interesting to hear how people relate to their power animal, even if that’s not what they call it. If you have a tattoo of an animal, maybe that’s your PA and you didn’t even know it. Maybe you collect art or tchotchkes of a certain bird. I would venture that everyone has an animal that they identify with and those are the stories I want to paint. After finding out about Tiger, I did some research into her attributes. In maturity, Tiger is devoted, courageous, persistent, intuitive and patient. This is definitely someone I want riding with me. In this portrait series, I want to tell the stories of people and their self-identified totems. Whether you have a strong relationship to a particular animal, or an animal-related allegory rings true, I want to tell the stories in your words and my paintings. Like The One You Feed I posted about earlier this week. Now it's your turn. Tell me what your spirit animal is and why. How long have you known? How did you find out or decide? Has it changed? Then, send me a photo of your animal, or yourself, or both depending on your backer level. I'll get in touch with you individually and we can collaborate on a cool piece of art. I have thirty days on Kickstarter to make it happen. Will you join me? This is going to be awesome. RAWR.

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