Monthly Archives: March 2008

Illustration Friday: Pet Peeve

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Pet Peeve
(click to enlarge)

Just a rather hurried sketch for this week’s Illustration Friday topic. One of my current pet peeves actually involves my pets: we simply cannot keep fresh flowers in the house, for they will be eaten. If this bouquet had any freesia in it my cat  already ate it, that’s his favorite. But it turns out he likes tulips just fine. And the other one would have fished out all the baby’s breath to play with; she doesn’t eat flowers but she likes to chew on crunchy things. They will actually show some restraint as long as someone’s in the same room, but as soon as your back is turned….

Alas, all of the living plants are already taking up the few sunny cat-resistant shelves so bouquets tend to end up in weird, high-up nooks and on top of bookshelves.

This was a very quick drawing, but I think it only really shows in the cat’s face (which I’m not that happy with). Flowers and background stuff can be rushed but faces… that’s usually asking for trouble.

PS for anyone curious about last week’s drawing, the zoo now has a bouncing baby boy elephant, 290 pounds, born just a few days after I posted about it!

Illustration Friday: Heavy

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I’d done some sketches for this week’s Illustration Friday topic but all those ideas went out the window when we went to the zoo over the weekend.

Elephant Mother
(Click to enlarge)

This is Felix. She is 22 months pregnant and could give birth any day now. African Elephants are pregnant for so long, that the “due date” is more like a “due month” and the earliest they were expecting the birth was over a week ago. The keepers were taking her out for a walk around their enclosure and making her jog around a bit for exercise. Elephants can lumber along pretty swiftly when they want to, but poor Felix was doing the elephant equivalent of waddling. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like you could see the shape of the baby when she was moving.

I think if she hasn’t given birth in a few more weeks, they’ll start thinking about feeding her spicy foods. Baby elephants can weigh 200-300 pounds when they’re born, and I’m sure Felix is at least as anxious as the zookeepers to welcome her little one into the world already.

Illustration Friday: Garden

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This week’s Illustration Friday topic actually fit quite well into a personal project I’m working on. Alas, at the end of a hectic week where I barely had time to do any drawing at all I managed to get the main figure sorted out, but the garden part of the composition was eluding me. Not even enough to post the sketch.

So instead, a treat from the dusty archives:

Flower Fairy: Petunia
“Petunia” (click to enlarge)

Yes, flower fairies, not the most original I admit. But always fun!

Fresh out of college back in 1996, when the internet was shiny and new and full of nerd jokes and little else, I thought it would be a great idea to make and sell notecards. What a concept, right? Well, I had no cash, no real plans, and was severely lacking in clues as well, but I made a handful of designs — cards, bookmarks, mini-posters — ran them off at Kinkos and tried to sell them a local flea market where the tables were cheap and a friend was scraping a few extra dollars a week giving tarot readings. Some, like these, I colored with watercolors and colored pencil.

They didn’t really sell. Eventually I got a job that actually paid the rent and another that let me buy food too, and with my weekends thus occupied the remaining inventory have sat in a box in the back of various closets for a very long time.

Flower Fairy: Tending Phlox
“Tending Phlox”

(I also thought puns like this were hysterically funny at the time.)

It amuses me to look at these now as I’m embarking on the 21st-century version of the same exercise. I’m tempted to add these to the lines I’m making now, but I might have to redraw them first. The odd proportions don’t bother me too much, but the head on the petunia fairy makes me wince, and these were two of the best in the series. At the least I’d recolor them digitally.

 I’m really hoping to stick to my plan and post an update every week — with a preference for new work! But I’ve been busily filling up my schedule for the spring and it now includes  lot more travel than I was planning. If at all possible, I’ll post while I’m away but there’ll be at least something here every week that I’m home, that’s a promise.

Illustration Friday: Leap

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Leap into it

I’m running a little late on this week’s Illustration Friday topic… I liked the idea so much I wanted to give it the full treatment. So here it is, about halfway through the inking stage. There are still pencil lines for most of the background, you can just barely see them if you click to enlarge. I wasn’t going to include a background (they take forever) but this one will go well in the product line I’m working on. I’ll post the finished artwork sometime next week.

I was doing a lot of research this week on print-on-demand product purchasing. This image would be one I’d like to put on notecards, prints, maybe some other things. What do you think?  For now I’m looking at the all-in-one fullfillment services that can handle the sales end of things for me, like CafePress or Zazzle, but ideally I’d like to have some printed nicely, maybe even letterpress. Still working on my inventory of images, but some of the ones already in this blog will probably be showing up there too!