Illustration Friday: Routine

My father refers to himself as a “high maintenance husband”, so for this week’s Illustration Friday topic “routine” I showed my mother giving him some routine maintenance. Not, as one of my housemates thought, being tortured.

I haven’t used scratchboard since the last time I used it for Illustration Friday (Worry, in May). It was easier this time (and this is a very small image: 5.5×7.5cm), but there are many things I will do differently next time - especially the shadows and outlines. After using pen and ink so much, scratchboard is an exercise in negative thinking.

Here’s the sketch:

ETA: One of the comments made me realise that there are two possible misinterpetations: the torture; and that my father makes us wait on him hand and foot! He has MS and needs assistance to do a number of things now, including cutting his fingernails. But when he was up and about, he was anything but demanding :)

Comments, critiques and further possible misinterpretations welcome. I can learn!

 

Illustration Friday: Detach

A sepia illustration for this week’s Illustration Friday topic: detach. Referenced surreptitiously from my father while we were watching Dr Who (although not a likeness, you can tell from the expression it’s not really his cup of tea).

This is one of a series of chapter-header illustrations I’ve been working on for an adaptation of a favourite legend, but was also drawn with this week’s theme in mind.

Newsflash: Two days ago I mentioned your opportunity to buy a villain (and other shocking objects) until 28 August 2008. Artscaresyou has now added an index of auction items, which should make the process of choosing (and bidding!) much easier. Here is how to bid, and the reason for the auction (i.e. Paul Haines’ bowels liver).

 

Illustration Friday: Sail

“In days gone by when the world was much younger, men harnessed the wind to work for mankind…”
– Alan Bell

Pen and ink illustration of a salt mill.

Comments and criticism are, as always, welcome.

I have completed the illustrations in the next sketchbook in our Portrait Party Moleskine Exchange and will post those soon. [ETA: now up].

 

Illustration Friday: Poof!

This week’s Illustration Friday theme became (indirectly) a 150 word short story written and illustrated on sticky notes and titled “The Entymologist”. This is a further working-up of the cover drawing. Comments and criticism are always welcome.

Here is a teaser of some other sketches. You never know, something may come of them*.

*That is not a promise.

 

Illustration Friday: Canned

Blame Aimee for the mermaid chunks, they were her idea:

This one is a sketch I did today on my lunch break of a wheelie bin and an old bell at the cathedral grounds near work:

 

Illustration Friday: Enough

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse–and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness–
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
-Omar Khayyam

An illustration in photoshop, based on the poem and with reference to this page of my sketchbook. There was originally more colour in it but then I was messing around with my favourite texture (an page from a 100 year old magazine - also featuring in Electricity and Forgotten) and this happened, and I liked it.

Comments and critique are welcome and helpful.

I know that between Illustration Friday and Alice and general superheroics that it looks like I’ve been sidetracked, but I promise more Vanuatu tales and sketches soon!

 

Illustration Friday: Foggy

This week a thumbnail. Next week, the world. Or at least, bits of Vanuatu.

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Also, as foggy can lead by association to vague –> rough –> sketchy, here are a couple concept sketches, of which more when something comes of them:

and:

 

Hopefully you can work out what they are about without clicking through!

As always, comments and critique are very welcome.

 

Illustration Friday: Punchline

I bought a new packet of six Pitt Artist Pens last week (brush tip markers) and celebrated by trying a marker illustration for this week’s Illustration Friday topic.

Every week I have a fairly broad concept that I would like to play with, and every week the topic cannot by any stretch of the imagination be dragged to fit it. But the robots happened along fairly early (probably as a result of reading about the making of Lots of Bots and looking at the preview images for Harvest is When I Need You The Most) and now I have a few pages of robot ideas to play with should the urge strike. Also a thumbnail of someone having a bad dream about a Punch & Judy show.

Comments and critiques are always welcome.

I’m going to be in Vanuatu for the next three weeks’ topics, but hope to be back in action after that! (I am planning on drawing while I’m there, but am devoting too much brainpower to working out which size sketchbook I want to use).

 

Illustration Friday: Forgotten

I would have liked to try this idea in scratchboard, but time did not permit and it is too cold to work at the large desk in the annex this time of year, this late at night. So this is a pencil sketch interfered with in Inkscape then coloured in Photoshop. I don’t like the roughness of the lines - I would prefer a cleaner, black and white image with hands that look less like an anteater’s claws.

I didn’t want to do something too maudlin or brooding or sentimental, so I decided to go with the idea of sleepers who are always lying around forgotten in old stories - waiting until they are needed or remembered. Arthur and Wenceslas and sleeping armies and ladies and castles and, on occasion, countries.

The line of poetry is from Walter de la Mare’s “All that’s past”:

Very old are the woods;

And the buds that break

Out of the brier’s boughs,

When March winds wake,

So old with their beauty are–

Oh, no man knows

Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.

Very old are the brooks;

And the rills that rise

Where snow sleeps cold beneath

The azure skies

Sing such a history

Of come and gone,

Their every drop is as wise

As Solomon.

Very old are we men;

Our dreams are tales

Told in dim Eden

By Eve’s nightingales;

We wake and whisper awhile,

But, the day gone by,

Silence and sleep like fields

Of amaranth lie.

So I may not have succeeded in being unsentimental :) I wasn’t thinking of the first verse when I drew this, but it may have been in the back of my mind along with certain lines from Prince Caspian.

Walt Bistline’s "Sleeping Knight" photograph used as reference.

 

Illustration Friday: Baby

As mentioned earlier, I was dithering between extremes for this topic. Nasty, nice, or something with Patrick Swayze in it?

I opted for the first two…