Illustration Friday: Nest

A very quick pen and ink sketch (with digital colour) of Peter Pan and the Neverbird (and Starkey’s hat) for Illustration Friday.

Illustration Friday: Tribal

A little pen and ink Neverland drawing with digital colour. I’ve put the colours separately below, because I like how they read – they almost work without the lines.

The clearly readable silhouette is an important principle of art (especially, I think, animation). It makes sure you can easily read exactly what’s going on. It’s something I think about a lot with my cut-paper pieces, and less with drawings than I should.

These are some of the earlier sketches for the idea. I still like them, and would like to play around with them, but I have Just A Few things due between now and when I fly out to America and Readercon!

Neverland – Kinds of Blue commission

This A4 pen and ink drawing was a commission, one of the rewards for support of the Pozible crowd-funding stage of Kinds of Blue. The central figure is a young relative of Bec Jee.

In other news: I am still writing! Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (of Small Beer Press) have been in town, so I have had some wonderful opportunities to talk about books and art and… everything with them, and to take Kelly on what was probably a hair-raising tour of the streets on either side of Wynnum Road (it moves around a lot). On the weekend I went to Kelly’s short-story workshop, “Magic for Beginners”, which was fun and informative, solved a number of difficulties I’ve had and gave me a long list of new ideas (more on this later, if I draw my current plan for this week’s Illustration Friday). In addition, I received some very useful feedback from Kelly on an airship story and Angela Slatter on a steampunk cafe story, so my brain is buzzing pleasantly. Good editing lies ahead!

Illustration Friday: Grounded

It is rather difficult to fly without fairy-dust (walk with a tail,  sail without a ship, fly to Neverland without someone to lead the way). I’d sort of like to finish this off and print fabric to upholster the armchair in my bedroom, but this may be part of a developing trend in which I wish other people would make my illustrations real for me.

This is pen and ink with digital colour and texture, and is a test swatch for half-a-dozen different jobs and projects simultaneously. Please admire my multitasking.

Back in June I posted a Peter Pan Dalek drawing and forgot to mention how much I like the Peter Pan elements of Matt Smith’s Doctor. It is such a storybook (lots of food and lots of fighting) time for Doctor Who at the moment – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory being among the latest of a line of fairly explicit references – but he was Peter Pan first: arriving in the middle of the night to spirit children away, having no concept of time, more or less alighting in the rafters of the church to forbid the bans (as Wendy expected Peter to), telling people never to grow up.