The Year of the Tiger

The Year of the Tiger
click to enlarge

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The latest in my Chinese Zodiac series, The Year of the Tiger is now available for sale at my RedBubble page, as notecards, prints, and T-shirts. I’ve ordered one of the T-shirts — being a Tiger myself — and I can’t wait to show it to you! The rest of the zodiac are in progress, I’ve scanned in all the inked ones and a couple are partly colored already. This image was drawn in ink with a brush pen and colored digitally; in the background is the Chinese character for the Tiger.

(I thought I’d posted this last week, but I guess it didn’t “take”…)

 In addition to finishing the Zodiac, I have plans afoot for this blog. Soon, very soon… 🙂

Year of the Rat

 

The Year of the Rat
click to enlarge

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The latest in my Chinese Zodiac series, The Year of the Rat is now available for sale at my RedBubble page, as notecards, prints, and T-shirts. The rest of the zodiac are in progress and coming soon! This image was drawn in ink with a brush pen and colored digitally; in the foreground is the Chinese character for the Rat.

You are probably a Rat if you were born in 2008, 1996, 1984, 1972, 1960, 1948, 1936, or 1924, but double-check the exact dates if your birthday is in mid-January to mid-February because the Lunar New Year is on a different date each year. Wikipedia’s Chinese Zodiac page is a good starting point for more information about all of the signs and their meanings.

I have the next three animals scanned in, they just need to be colored, I hope to have one or two done by next week.

Year of the Rabbit – in color!

Year of the Rabbit
click to enlarge

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Now, in full color! The Year of the Rabbit, from the Chinese zodiac, is now available for sale at my RedBubble page, as notecards, prints, and even T-shirts! I’ll be making more products available when the whole series is complete. Check out the details in this closeup:

Year of the Rabbit - detail

I have over half the zodiac inked so far, with three that are still in the pencil-drawing stage and two that I’m still mucking about with sketches for. That mischievious monkey just refuses to cooperate! I’m still playing around a bit with the colors, that’s the thing about a personal project: there’s really nothing to stop you from tweaking it forever and ever and ever. But the plan is to finish this series by the end of September at the latest, and that’s including my vacation. And I already have my next project lined up….

Illustration Friday: Fail

Well, it’s hard to post a drawing when I embodied this week’s Illustration Friday topic by failing to draw something new, so you all will just have to suffer with another from the archive:

The Tortoise and the Eagle
The Tortoise and the Eagle (Click to enlarge)

This is another by good ol’ Aesop, which seems to cover the topic well enough: the fable of The Tortoise and the Eagle.

A Tortoise, dissatisfied with lowly crawling on the ground, envied the birds who could soar high into the clouds whenever they desired. One day, he offered an Eagle all the treasures in the ocean if she would only teach him how to fly. The Eagle declined the offer at first, but the Tortoise kept insisting and pleading. “Fine, I will teach you to fly,” said the Eagle and, taking him up in her talons carried him high into the sky. As she let go of him, she said, “Now, spread your legs and fly!” But before the Tortoise could say one word in reponse, he plunged straight down, hit a rock, and was dashed to pieces.

Moral: Demand your own way, demand your own ruin.

Detail from “The Tortoise and the Eagle”

Yeah, he failed. Big time.

Illustration Friday: Save

The Monkey and the Dolphin
The Monkey and the Dolphin (Click to Enlarge)

This week’s posting for Illustration Friday is from my archives again. This is another one from Aesop’s Fables, one of his less-well-known stories The Monkey and the Dolphin. It’s the story of a dolphin saving a monkey… sort of:

A Sailor, bound on a long voyage, took with him a Monkey to amuse him while on shipboard. As he sailed off the coast of Greece, the ship became caught in a violent storm. The ship was wrecked, and all the crew were thrown into the water and forced to swim for their lives. A Dolphin saw the Monkey struggling, and thinking he was a man, whom dolphins are said to befriend, he went to help him and carried him on his back straight for the shore.

When they arrived within sight of Piraeus, the harbor of Athens, the Dolphin asked if the Monkey if he were an Athenian.

Yes,” answered the Monkey. “Certainly. I’m from one of the most noble families in the city.”

“Then of course you know Piraeus,” said the Dolphin.

“Oh, yes,” replied the Monkey, supposing that it was the name of some distinguished citizen, “He is one of my most intimate friends.”

Infuriated at these falsehoods, the Dolphin dived to the bottom of the water and left the lying monkey to his fate.

It’s a little grim, but I really couldn’t resist the chance to draw a picture of a monkey riding a dolphin.

Not much more time to chat this week. It’s been a bit hectic around here, as I’ve had on my graphic-designer hat reformatting a lot of my older work for reuse. Between that and spring maintenance taking up most of my “art time” I haven’t even had time to finish my new drawings, much less visit anyone’s blogs — I’ll get caught up soon! My frog from a few weeks back is just waiting for a few hours of quality coloring time, and he has a friend in the same situation… I want to post something new here before I disappear on my trip at the end of the month, darnit!

Illustration Friday: Heavy

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: Leap

 

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!

Illustration Friday: Multiple

Sketches: Rat

Time was a bit short this week for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, tho I found it quite intriguing. I’m in the midst of a project, which will be a series, which could fit, but it’s still in progress. So that’s what I’m posting today: work in progress! As always, click to enlarge.
Like many artists, every piece I make starts out something like this. Once I have my basic idea I doodle and sketch until I’ve worked out all the proportions, poses, and details to my satisfaction. Because I work in ink I have to get as much figured out in the pencil sketch and underdrawing as possible, while I can still erase easily. Sometimes there are layers of tracing paper and/or photocopies of previous sketches taped down as I refine the layout. Sometimes these sketch pages are more satisfying than the finished piece! Usually there’s one that really stands out on the page, but sometimes it’s harder to choose.

I was looking for some of my older work that would qualify, but couldn’t find anything already digitized. Which has me a bit worried, since one project was done digitally. when I have a chance this weekend I’m going to have to go through my miscellaneous backup CDs to look for it. I’m forcing myself to be better about backups, but I don’t have the same hardware for my home system as I do at work, which automates the process so I don’t have to think about. In fact, I have redundant multiple backups at work, which has saved my butt more than once. But at home my backups tend to be in batches of CDs which can get a bit messy as each one is in whatever filing system that seemed like a good idea at the time so the same file might be on more than one disk but in a different folder.  And after two house moves and three computers every now and then I uncover another stash of disks, but I think I’ve gotten them all now. What I’m overdue for is a big session of going through all the disks with the multiple versions of my files and the final versions of everything to make multiple copies of my master archive. And getting a decent firewire drive. Can’t have too many backups!