Scribbles & Scribings

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!

An Appointment Kept 2006 (click to enlarge)

So, I was looking for some different, older, partially-aborted but more-directly-related-to-this-week’s -Illustration-Friday-topic images… but I couldn’t find them. I just got my new backup drive, but I haven’t gone digging through my archives yet to populate it. Somehow we’ll all have to console ourselves with this piece instead.

It’s not directly an homage, but it’s definitely the result of years of reading wonderful fantasy and sci-fi authors who have brought the unreal to life. Yes, I went through an intense Anne McCaffery phase, lol, but read voraciously and doodled fan artwork from many others, including our dearly departed Arthur C. Clark. In particular, I was also inspired by the art of Michael Whelan, who’s used the covers of those books and many others to bring vividly to life countless dragons, aliens, otherworldly landscapes, and the very human people caught in their midst. I’d always admired the rich colors and detail in his artwork and the obvious attention he pays to making sure the the book cover was true to the story inside. (It’s a pet peeve of mine when it’s obvious that a cover artist has no idea about the actual story they’re illustrating… but it does make me a bit sad that this narrative style for book cover art is out of vogue these days.) Is it a weird coincindence that his artwork graced the covers for many of my favorite genre authors? His cover artwork clearly takes the design of the book cover into account, but remains interesting on its own too. Even though I’ve focused on a very different medium, he’s definitely one of my earliest and enduring inspirations.

This is one of the larger ink drawings I’ve done so far — the original is on 19×24 bristol, with most of the details drawn with teeny tiny 005 Micron pens, scanned and colored digitally. It was made as a fine-art piece for display; this image and the rest in the series weren’t from any story in particular but from a general idea for a story I’ve had floating around in my head. I was sooooo sick of drawing foliage by the time I was done, but even I’m amazed at how it looks in a 30-inch-tall giclee print. These low-res images hardly do it justice, alas.

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:

“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.

“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.