#el cadejo

[sun-citadel]

Finished logo thumbnail concepts for class ! I'm surprised I did these in one sitting.

All of them are based off Mesoamerican / Latino mythology :)

[werecreaturepride]

Canine Cryptid Special Interest Flag

Special Interest in Canine/Canoid Cryptids.

Template by @daybreakthing

Colors are: Dark Grey, Grey-Brown, Dullish Brown, Rich Brown, and Cream, colors are mentioned to represent the fur colors most often seen in Cryptids. Heart and Star: Red-Orange, Sparkles: Yellow to represent the common eye colors of Cryptids.

If this has been coined before count this as an alternate flag, and also link me the flag because I want to reblog:)

[3gremlins]

"el cadejo"

another entry into my mythological creatures coloring pages series (from november)!

Anyway El Cadejo is a folklore that comes from central america (mostly el salvador and guatemala but folklore moves and evolves around places, so there's all sorts of variants on it).

(long post is long)

The myth tells of a spirit that appears in the shape of a large dog like creature with glowing eyes that appears to travelers on the road at night. If the dog is black with glowing red eyes, the traveler is doomed and will be eaten; if the dog is white with blue eyes, they'll have a safe journey. In some versions, there are two dogs- so if the white dog appears while the black dog is upon you, you will be saved (usually you're just SOL if you see the black dog). In other versions, there is only one "dog" and the color/eyes are just determined by how the spirit is feeling that day (if it's calm, it is white with blue eyes, if it's angry, black with red eyes).

Most descriptions of the dog are that it's kind of thin and tall and weird looking for a dog, so I decided to base these on coyotes (specifically the subspecies that are found in central america- they have slighter frames and slightly different features to other subspecies).

They do look like dogs at a glance until you get up close and are like OH NO THAT'S NOT A DOG*. Coyotes are also ambush pack hunters- often you'll see one coyote and it will "lure" you into the rest of the pack which matched up a little bit with some stories of the black dog "luring" travelers to their death (particularly travelers who were incapacitated in some manner).

It's also often described as having long tangles of hair along its back but a naked face- so I gave it a tendril-y mane and sort of a more sunken look to its face with some hints of skull. I wanted the black dog to feel darker but not actually be completely opaque too, so it got a lot of line work whereas the white dog got very little. They still (hopefully) look related. 

For the scene, I really wanted to try and convey an isolated area that's not that far from civilization-almost because you're so close to home, that getting waylaid by something supernatural is THAT much worse.  I also wanted it to be clearly night time but making that fun to color was a weird balance (i might tweak it when i get to the colored in version)- I ended up doing negative space inking with white on the mountains to give a little more texture to them while still keeping it a night scene. I went with the two dogs version mostly just b/c it fit what I wanted with the composition (the fear of "you're so close to home" but the also slight relief of "ah but maybe there's help on the way" and then pair it with the "but will it be in time")

this was actually suggested by my therapist, who is from el salvador and his father would tell him cautionary tales of el cadejo when he was groing up. i've been trying to expand what sorts of folklore i hit for this book (that i have been eternally working on now T.T) and he was telling me how he would have loved as a kid to see more of the tales he grew up with in more mainstream books etc.

(i really want people to feel seen and included in my work but i also don't want to overstep so i've been trying to balance that. Doing the research for this one made me really want to learn spanish b/c i found so many great folklore articles that jstor didn't have the best translations for lol).

*i'm originally from new england where we actually had coyote-wolf hybrids running amok (coywolves) and they are REALLY big and not something you'd want to meet at night when walking your dog (they also will absolutely stalk you/try to bait your dog, and they do eat pets a fair amount) so i was also pulling from that a bit. Most of the coyotes you get in socal and further south are much smaller and not terribly aggressive.

[whydoihavetoart]

[dragoncreator312]

“The El Cadejo Pokemon”

Hisuian Typhlosion/Mega Houndoom/Mightyena/Dubwool/Zoroark

Ghost/Fire

[opalio]

Carlos Loarca. Lo Dinamico En Nosotros Los Animales, Acrylic on Canvas, 1980.

[lpbestiary]

El cadejo is the name given to a pair of legendary creatures in Central American folklore. Known particularly in Guatemala and El Salvador, there are two cadejos; one white, one black. Both are said to resemble large dogs, the size of cows, with aspects of goats or bulls.

The white cadejo is good, and will protect those in the streets at night, guiding drunks home and watching over the homeless. The black cadejo, on the other hand, is incredibly evil. Its maliciousness ranges from tempting people into bad decisions to eating newborn babies. Some believe the black cadejo is an incarnation of the Devil himself.

Image source.

Monster master list.

Suggest a spook.

[chechula]

This Monthly monster drawing(for my patreon) is El Cadejo,dog-like spirit from Central America folklore...there is whitte and black version, one leads you to safety, one to the death  ♥ I wanted to draw something different this month so it’s some webtoon-like experiment ♥