This drawing is about the Aztec gods of death and transformation. I have thumbnails below showing each god and here and an explanation of each image: Tezcatlipoca was a deciever that tricked Quetzalcoatl which brought about his exile. The cult of Tezcatlipoca was filled with sacrfice and a kin to black magic. The ancient ones believed that there were four suns that existed until the era that we're in now, the Fifth sun. There is a monolith of a dying sun at the anthropolgy museum in Mexico City that inspired the sun image in the center of the piece. "The Earth Monster" devouring the sun is how the phenomena of sunsets were explained. The dog creature Xolotl was the companion of Queztalcoatl and present when he dropped bones to create the first humans. Next to his figure are stars based on paterns from Aztec art respresenting stars. I placed stars next to him because, Xolotl is seen as the evening star in the Aztec world. The drawing is oil pastel on bristol vellum. I used a layer harder, less expensive pastels and then layers of smoother, creamier ones and an exacto knife to create expressive lines and hatch marks. The female skeletal figures below dwelled in Mictlan and were the handmaidens of the Lord of Mictlan. They took the souls of women who died in childbirth. Behind them is a skull wrack based on a sketch from the the Temple Mayor museum. The drawing was inspired by my visit to Mexico City many years ago and my studies since I was a child about the Aztecs. I put all of the images together to appear as a vision, from a dream or hallucination in a tight space much like the way these images are presented in the murals of Rivera or Orozco.