#kapre

Cryptid of the Day: Kapre

A quantity of Mangos, tryin to get more comfortable w/ drawin her, + trying to keep her hands consistently chunky.

Jus realized that I can just..post stuff that isnt fully shaded? XD. And doing collages(or do you call it a spread?? Idk) like this is more fun for me, bc shading hurts my head and I change my process every time XD. So yeah, I guess Im gonna lean more quanity over quality for a while.

KAPRE’S WRATH 

Legend from The Island of Mindoro

One moonlit night in the barrio of Balete the woman of the house heard an eerie sound never heard before. The sound came from the backyard which was planted with tall trees. Overcome with fear the woman did not dare to find out what it was. The following night the same noise coming from the same direction was heard again. The mother felt alone for no one else in the family was awake. Through a slit on the door she peeped to find out if their dog was around, for if there was really nobody coming, the dog would bark. The dog was under the stairs but it had remained silent. After some moments, the dog whined long and loud. This awakened and scared all the other members of the household. No one dared to go out to find out what it was. The next morning they found the dog gone. It could not be found in the whole vicinity. The next evening while ironing some clothes, the woman was alarmed to find a handful of soil laid on one end of the ironing board. Who could have placed it there? Again she heard the weird sound. This time she mustered enough courage to peeped through a small opening of the window facing the backyard. There she beheld a bearded man of enormous size as black as coal. He smoked a roll of tobacco as big as a banana trunk with thick smoke coming from a chimney. His large eyes seem to be focused on her. She woke up her companions and peeped again. The creature was gone. What the woman saw was believed to be a kapre. Not long after this incident the family abandoned the place and settled in another barrio. From Philippine Folk Literature Series: Vol. III, The Legends (2002), compiled and edited by Damiana L. Eugenio, published by The University of the Philippines Press (shopee, amazon)

Mod's Annotations:

The word "kapre" had originally come from the Spanish "cafre" and often referred to Muslim infidels which incidentally had actually come from Arabs that referred to Christians as "kafir" or Christian infidels. There's a good chance that the current understanding of what a kapre is may had also been influenced from racially prejudiced stereotypes of not only Muslims but also the dark-skinned Negrito indigenous groups of the country that was spread among the Hispanicized Christian population of the country (Tan, 2008).

It isn't specified which people group from Mindoro this story comes from so I can't be specific if it comes from a specific ethnic group. Mindoro has multiple ethnic groups that reside within the island and speak a variety of languages with Batangas Tagalog being the most common.

Annotation References

One of my finals project.

Kapres are mythical creatures that hides up in the tree and and tricks people by giving misdirections.

Their appearance are somewhat bigger than an average human body, very huge, strong body odor,

And they would always smoke from a from a cigar thats big enough for them.