Illustration Friday: Crunchy

Pen with colour added in Photoshop, layout inspired by Jacob Haynes’ entry last week. I should, of course, be concentrating on what can be done with black and white rather than on layout at this point (secret project + general comics education). Maybe next week.

This is not me but maybe possibly based on a real occurence(s). It’s a good thing people keep giving me plants. Sometimes when I come home there are bromeliads or potless aloe vera in the sink. The neighbour gives them to us over the fence and my sister puts them there for me (hah!) to deal with. This week the neighbour gave us a pot of rosemary, now sitting under the front windows next to the mysteriously-still-not-quite-dead-yet geraniums. One of the elders from church stopped by with his wife for pfeffernuesse and tea one Sunday night and they gave me something glossy with white flowers (they didn’t know what it was either, which is how horror stories start, but so far it is coping with life on the kitchen bench).

Other parts based on real life: I bought the necklace on Saturday when on the Paddington art gallery walk (late opening, paintings, guitar and violin, cheese and crackers, Spanish barbeque, Pendragon shoes…). I have a shirt with that collar, but it is blue and white striped – I would quite like this one. A red enamel watering can (all the better to kill the petunias with) is one of my few extravagant house related purchases. And the perennial petunia really is dead and crispy.

 

Illustration Friday: Entangled

It can be metaphorical, if you like. Mostly I’ve just been reading too much of The Faery Reel and think Moreton Bay Fig buttress roots look prehensile. Pen with colour added in Photoshop, and you can see a larger version here.

This may end up becoming the December blog header, which is the reason for the shape.

 

Illustration Friday: Music

Pen lines with colour added in Photoshop. Based on a photo of me in a tree, aged about 3, and a very grainy video of me hamming it up on the piano for reference purposes the other night.

I maintain that all children should be forced to learn the piano – after that, you can read the music for anything else.

 

Illustration Friday: Unbalanced

A little cotton-candy circus fantasy for Illustration Friday. You can see it larger here.

The panels were done in Inkscape, the lines with a pen and everything else in Photoshop.

The texture in the background is from the endpapers of my great-grandfather’s autograph album, which as best I can tell was in use from at least 1908 to 1913 and contains signatures and poems and paintings and such sentiments as:

Fall from the hill tops,
Fall from above
Fall from every where
But for Heaven’s sake,
Don’t Fall in Love.
Janey McHough – 11.12.08

Good boys love their sisters
But far better have they grown
That they love other boys’ sisters
Far better than their own
ELS – Oct 24 1907

To Willy:
“Be Good.”
Yours “The Egg”
31st May 1907
HMS Orient

 

Illustration Friday: Blur

Larger version here.

Pen line work with digital colour and editing. Part character test, part messing around with thaumatropes (and dirigibles). The reason for Gwen’s expression in the last panel is because she is actually doing something subversive (more on this in the fulness of time).

The two separate pictures are of a dirigible and (if you turn your computer upside down) a seated man who has just dropped a bowl. Together they are *meant* to look like a rudimentary and possibly unfeasible aircraft. Still working on the optical illusions here.

Edited to turn one of the images the right way up – I kept waking up last night with it bothering me.

 

Illustration Friday: Skinny

Ah, November, season of writing 2,000+ words a day.

Illustration Friday this week is themed “Skinny”, which led me to think of long, thin (relatively speaking) tails, and long clever fingers.

Et voila:

This is also the new blog header. I do have some slightly more developed ideas on the theme, but see the first sentence of this post to calculate the likelihood of them being finished by Friday.

 

Illustration Friday: Fast

But of course.

Three layers of graphite pencil rendered unrecognisable in Photoshop.

 

MX42 / Illustration Friday: Frozen

Jadis of Charn, the White Witch of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I’ve defined the nose a bit more since scanning this. Also, I’ve learned one lesson from my painting attempts – I can’t expect to work at the same scale and level of detail as I can in pen and ink!

This is for both Illustration Friday and for Lady Orlando’s “Witches” themed moleskine for the 42nd Moleskine Exchange http://moleskinex42.blogspot.com/.

In other news, here are three discarded designs for a bookplate (the final will be revealed once it is finalised):

Scratchboard:

Pen and ink:

Scratchboard again (with garish colours for kicks):

 

Illustration Friday: Flying

This is a product of my reading habits this year, the sudden surge of interest in steampunk (it’s Steampunk Month on Tor.com if you’d like more information on that), living under a flightpath (for really small planes – it’s like living in a WWII movie) and a song that was the soundtrack to part of my college career (it’s bizarre and will start playing without warning: Moon Song).

A very quick piece in between 32 translations (and counting), work and picking my sister up from the station. Pen and ink with digital colour.

 

Illustration Friday: Germs

This is genuinely to do with the topic – influencing factors include Auden’s poem “As I walked out one evening”, Hugh Lunn’s description in Over the Top with Jim of his father always breaking chipped teacups (because of the germs – see!), one of my tea sets (hand painted in lilac and gold, but without rhinoceri), and a rhinoceros (for which I have my reasons).

Also: I have finished (and finished uploading) the latest sketchbook, now showing on Flickr, and have just finished a book plate design for Gillian Polack.