This week’s Illustration Friday topic reminded me of something that happened with a friend of mine this summer. She just moved to a place where she could have a little backyard garden, which she’s been enjoying. It’s a rowhouse, and her next-door neighbors had set up some hummingbird feeders, so she’d also been enjoying watching the pretty birds come around.

One day she was watering her plants near that side of the yard, being very careful so as not to frighten the many hummingbirds that were at the feeders that day. Suddenly, one of them flew right up to her. She was both amazed and nervous as he stared her straight in the eye for a good long while. Wondering if he was going to attack her, as ridiculous as that seemed, she didn’t know what to do until finally the tiny bird flew away back to the other yard. We still don’t know why, but suspect it had to do with reflections on her glasses.

I used a little reference this week, but not too much. It’s not a very good likeness of my friend, I’m afraid, and the greenery is a bit more generic than usual, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out for a quicky. My light table and a lot of my reference material are packed up as I’m remodeling my art studio right now. The drawing was done on a small piece of bristol with Micron pens and the coloring was all done in Photoshop.

Excuse me for getting a bit fangirl for a moment, but while I was pondering this week’s Illustration Friday topic we were sitting down for a rare evening in front of the TV. We’re still working through the first season of Battlestar Galactica. Actually, I was more interested in drawing the senior Adama because Edward James Olmos has such an interesting face, but technically he’s the Commander so I drew his son Captain Adama instead. Just a relatively quick drawing from a photo.

I didn’t do any tracing, but I don’t usually work directly from a photograph like this. Athough I use photos a lot for reference, particularly when drawing a particular type of animal or specific bit of scenery, I usually end up straying pretty far from the source. I prefer to use photos to get a good enough feel for my subject that I can “pose” them however I like, but that’s a lot of work for such a quick portrait – and this one was pretty quick.

OK, I might be stretching this week’s Illustration Friday topic a bit, but it seems to fit! This is one from the archives, because I was working on another personal project this week, which I’ll be posting later. This was an academic piece where the assignment was to illustrate a traditional phrase (of our choice), working in paint on illustration board. I can’t say it’s one of my best works, I’m not as comfortable with paint as I am with ink and it’s from a time when I was still struggling with my total aversion to drawing backgrounds, but I still like it.

EDIT: Jason finally finished his own essay for this week’s topic!

Has anyone seen my keys? I swear I set them down just a second ago, where could they have gone? Aaarrrgh, this seems to happen every time I’m running late….

The idea for this week’s Illustration Friday topic came quickly — it happens to me ALL the time — and was drawn just as quickly. Not too happy with how it came out, but I wanted to get it posted, and time is short this week, as we just returned from vacation.

Once again this week, my husband has taken on the challenge of a short writing assignment of his own.

OK so I’m a little late for this week’s Illustration Friday topic.
We’re on vacation all week, but this one sparked an idea from a project I’ve been mullling around for a while so I felt really inspired to do something for it. No scanner, so it’s just a photo of the page, and I had to wait until we had an internet connection again to post it.

My husband has also written something extremely silly about the moon on his blog.