Take A Bow for the Kappa

This was going to be my entry into the weekly throwdown challenge, but there's no way I'm gonna get it finished, inked, and colored in time. Oh well, it was a fun design to do. This week's challenge was to do a creature of myth, but the twist was to do something not so common and overdone as say a dragon or a griffon. So I chose a Kappa which is a type of Japanese water demon. From what I understand, it has a bowl/dish in the top of it's head that keeps the water from it's pond/river/lake/etc. when it ventures out on land. They're known to be mischievous and are quite nasty little buggers sometimes. They drown people, assault women, and apparently next to cucumbers, children are their favorite foodstuffs. There's a couple ways to pacify/defeat them. One being to throw a cucumber with the names of you and your family members carved into it in the water where the Kappa lives. Apparently, it'll just munch on the cucumber and not, you know, your family. Another way to defeat one, is apparently Kappas are extremely polite or strictly follow etiquette (although you'd think eating one's family would be extremely impolite, but whatever) and if you bow to a Kappa it has the desire to bow back. If you bow deep enough the water in it's head bowl will spill out and the Kappa will be immobilized. Thus why I was going to have "Take a Bow" written in the banner at the bottom. Pretty interesting stuff, right?