Crow and Water

Another rejected t-shirt design for ARCC. This time it was because I had illustrated one of Aesop's fables instead of something Chinese. Oops. The board wouldn't even have noticed if I hadn't asked my friend to look it up online real quick during the meeting. It slipped by because a lot of us had heard the story as children in Chinese, either from textbooks that had translated it or from a relative (which was my case).

I didn't work too hard on this one because I hadn't really warmed up to the idea too much; it was just a suggestion from a friend. It's very simple. Plus it was too hard trying to figure out how to convincingly shade a bottle of water in black and white. There was supposed to be a logo on the bottle but I removed that for this version

Aesop's fable goes as follows......
Once upon a time, there was a crow. He was very thirsty, and so he was surprised and pleased to find a bottle full of clear clean water. He tried his best to fit his head in the bottle, but no matter how he pushed, he could not reach the water. The crow was understandably upset. He did not want to knock over the bottle, because then the water would be spilled before he could drink any of it. He didn't want to get his head stuck. And he certainly did not want to look for another source of water, since that required actual movement and would make him even thirstier. At that moment, the clever bird noticed several small stones nearby that would fit easily in the neck of the bottle. He picked them up one by one in his beak and dropped them into the bottle. Finally, enough water displacement occurred that he could finally reach the water with his beak. Happily, he slaked his thirst.

He also utilized the theory of water displacement effectively some hundreds of years before Archimedes discovered it in a revelation in his bathtub, causing him to run around naked shouting, "Eureka!"

<sub>PS: Yes, I'm aware of the anachronism in this picture.

This was made in Photoshop CS2 with the vector pen tool.</sub>