It's been 11 days already since I released the last Bee for my series of 12 handdrawn HIVE Bees. Had a lot of work and art to do the past days. But I finally managed to get the next Bee done. And it's quite an interesting one I feel.

Just a quick reminder. If you haven't checked out Bee #11 - The Guardian take a look at my last Blog Post about it 😁 If you like. ▶️ #11 THE GUARDIAN BEE

With that being said, let's move on to...

#10 Undertaker Bee

One might think what a funny name for a Bee. But this one has a very specific job to do.

Most Bees usually die outside, but still 10% die within the Bee hive. The Undertaker Bees' job is it to take care of the dead bodies. Once they have dried up the Undertaker Bee picks them up and flies them hundreds of feet away from the Hive, so they don't attract pests and pathogens. Not the most glamorous job, but still a very important one.

Check it out on NFT Showroom HERE 🔽

But as usual I also want to take you through the steps of creating this specific piece of the collection. As usual I started doing some research on Undertakers. And funnily most results were about the WWE legend. Which wasn't very helpful to be honest.

But I found some references that were helpful, so I kinda just started going and did a bit of scribbling and sketching around.

SKETCH

As you can see the sketch ended up being very wild, but I was pretty satisfied with the shapes, also trying to catch the essence of the series. So I moved on to clean up this little mess and do some much cleaner outlines to get a better feeling of what this is going to look like in the end.

OUTLINES

I had a feeling it ended up looking pretty good. I wasn't going for a beauty-queen with this one, but much more for a little bit of a worn out and more edgy character. Because, well its supposed to be an Undertaker.

FLAT COLORS

Next step was to define the base colors. And for that I really used the previous Bees as references. Because once again I really wanted to make them all look like they could belong to the same tribe.

The Final Version of the Undertaker Bee

After I defined the base colors and was happy with them I just had to do some shading, add some highlights, add a background to give it some depth and bring it all together.

I hope the HIVE community will welcome and like this new member of the Bee HIVE NFT series.

For the Undertaker Bee I really wanted to give her the look of a working Bee. She is not a Beauty-Queen. And doesn't really care about her appearance. She wears working clothes, she smokes and she is quite rough around her edges. She is also quite a tough character as she has to carry around all the dead Bees in those heavy coffins.

I hope you will like this piece of the series. You can check it out on NFT Showroom: https://nftshowroom.com/gallery/unicrisx8_hive-bees_10-undertaker-bee

Have a great weekend everyone, take care and see you again for #9 The Technician Bee.

Cheers, Unicris 🥃