Scribbles & Scribings

 
click to enlarge

Despite years of dancing, a new focus on fitness that includes cardio kickboxing, and a general effort to the contrary, I’m still rather clumsy. My habits of running into inanimate objects and tripping over microscopic bits of dust are not nearly as bothersome as my perpetual case of butterfingers. I try to take care when handling items that are particularly precious and fragile, but I’m not always successful. So I could relate all too well when the Illustration Friday word this week was “clumsy.”

Case in point:  I was cleaning up after we had a simple dinner in our den one night last week. It was a nice stew my husband made, and we were using the pair of lovely Japanese bowls his father had given us a long time ago. As I was approaching the steps I stumbled over a bit of lint and the empty bowls slipped from my hands. One landed safely on our plush carpet, but the other must have hit the edge of the step in just the wrong way because it broke apart, the bright white ceramic forming jagged edges against the glossy black glaze. They were our favorite pair of bowls too, the perfect size and kept the food nice and warm.  (Sorry, dad! There’s a reason why most of our drinking glasses are plastic tumblers…)

This was a quick drawing from life with a Pitt brush pen on regular bristol paper, 9×12 inches.

click to enlarge

One of the things I like about living where I do is that even though we’re near a big city, we’re also just a short drive away from a stroll in the middle of the woods. We’re a day-trip away from pathless forest and parkland, but just a 15-minute drive will take us someplace where we can forget all about the traffic and the city and all the people and wander under the trees for a while.

My sketch for this week’s word for Illustration Friday, “wilderness,” is from a photograph I took in Gunpowder Falls State Park, one of the more easily-accessible parts of of the massive Chesapeake Bay watershed system. I find tree-roots fascinating and these right on the shore of the lake were tangled in a confusing mangle that I spent much longer than I’d planned on puzzling through. (The fox was an addition; we used to get them in our neighborhood regularly but it’s been a few years since I’ve seen one here.)

Drawn with 05 black marker on regular surface bristol paper, 9×12 inches.

 
(click to enlarge)

I’m hoping this isn’t a bad omen for my return to Illustration Friday: this drawing, “Cat Contained,” was conceived and drawn before I realized I’d mis-read the Illustration Friday word for this week. However, I think it still works, after all, I’d just have to close that flap and…

Just a quick drawing on evening while watching a movie. Both of my cats usually make a beeline for an open box in the middle of the floor, but tonight they decided it was the least interesting thing in the room so I had to wing the cat. This time it’s Tinkerbell, who is generally a far more “contained” cat than Tony, even though he’s the one who’s a fiend for squeezing into small boxes. Original drawing with 0.5 tech pen on 9×12″ smooth bristol, with a light pencil sketch underneath (erased).

However,  what is very much in keeping with the IF word this week is that today was Human Trafficking Awareness Day.  Modern slavery is a truly horrible and growing and largely invisible problem in the developed world, and several of my favorite webcomics artists have teamed up in a fundraiser to support groups trying to help the victims of this criminal practice. If you’d like to help out with this worthy cause, check out the Comic Creator Alliance this week!

click to enlarge

This week’s Illustration Friday topic fits very neatly into my current project: portraits of the animals in the Chinese Zodiac. This is the Rabbit, accompanied by a symbolic stone with his sign. I’ve already posted the Snake and the Ox, and more are on the way. I debated whether to include the stones in these images, but I really liked having a concrete sign of why I was making them… a talisman of sorts. It turns a simple drawing of a rabbit into a symbol of something more, representing one piece in a whole intricate structure of meanings with an ancient history.

These images will all be for sale at my RedBubble page, if you want a card or print. I’ll be making more products available when the whole series is complete.

I’m about one third of the way through drawing the series, although I still need to color them all. It’s been fun using the brush pen again… if I think I can cat-proof the arrangements I’d like to start using a regular brush with ink again. Along with dip pens, they’ve been sidelined in the interest of keeping the ink on the paper and off of the floor.

 
(click images to enlarge them)

Perhaps an unusual choice for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, anyone who can model so unselfconsciously for life drawing strikes me as the epitome of poise. This model in particular managed to look positively serene while wearing french powdered wig in a very crowded and noisy bar while people were staring at her and scribbling frantically.

While I was attending the SWSX conference in March, I had the great fortune to attend an event which included a session of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.  There’s more info at the link, but in brief it’s like a life drawing class except instead of in a formal art studio it’s at a bar or club, and instead of a nude model you have a cabaret or burlesque performer in costume.

In this particular case, the life drawing was going on in the back of the club, while an actual burlesque show was going on at the main stage. Because it was part of the conference it was packed, but I managed to snag a stool and pad of paper in the drawing area. The performers were lining up to model when they were between sets, they were so excited to participate. It was very cool!

We only did five-minute poses. It has been sooooo long since I did life drawing like this, much less while balancing a pad of paper on my knee sitting on a barstool, but it was great fun.

Unfortunately, just as I really felt I was getting warmed up, the rest of my cohorts were ready to move on. But I got several very nice sketches done, and they even managed to survive the night intact.

There are Dr. Sketchy’s clubs scattered all over the country… if this sounds like fun to you, google to see if there’s one near you!

(click to enlarge)

Even though this week’s Illustration Friday topic gave me several intriguing ideas, I don’t have time right now to make any of them! (sketches will be filed away for later tho…) Instead, I’m uploading a preview of a particularly intricate image I’ve been working on. I just finished the ink drawing this week, and I thought those scales were going to kill me. Scale patterns are so complex and regular, I had to deliberately simplify or I’d be working on it for weeks despite modeling it after a species with simple coloration. I’ll be adding some more details and color shortly.

I just spent the evening scanning in this and three others in the series… almost halfway done! For anyone who doesn’t recognize it, this is the Snake from the Chinese Zodiac, and will be part of a series of 12. Of course, I’ve changed direction slightly and will have to edit my Ox image to match, but that’s what happens when a control freak like me has no outside deadlines.

click to enlarge

Getting back into the swing of things, I was feeling inspired by this week’s Illustration Friday topic. Of course, it’s not exactly seasonal — around here we just had what everyone is hoping was the last big snowfall of the winter before spring starts seriously springing — but the word “breezy” always brings to mind those crisp autumn days when the wind just picks up the leaves and swirl them around. Wouldn’t it be fun to hitch a ride?

She’s a little rough and quick, but I couldn’t resist dressing this inked sketch up with a bit of quick color.  I have a hankering to draw more fairies, but costume design has always been a bit of a challenge for me. Hmmm… maybe that’s why I want to do more of it.

Whether this week’s Illustration Friday topic refers to her current status or her barely contained anger, I leave up to you… but I don’t think I want to be around when she finally gets out! Click the image to enlarge it.

… and don’t go trying to change her mind! (Even if it is way past her bedtime…)

I am resolved to simplify things, if it allows me to meet my other resolution to post something new weekly. In this case, this week’s oh-so-appropriate Illustration Friday topic — the word is “resolve” — a fairly quick one in between working on a slightly more ambitious project.

This is also the first piece of new artwork to be scanned in with my most practical Christmas present: an A3 Mustek scanner. Now I can draw on my 11×17 paper without having to scan it in pieces and piece it together in Photoshop! Not that it was an issue with this one because it was so small, but as I said, I have more ambitious projects underway….

Looking back on this year, it’s been a very busy one. Unlike some people out there, most of the chaos has been good. Crazy-making sometimes, but usually for good reasons. I have lots to be grateful for and despite the current state of things in the world I have a good deal of optimism for 2009.

As far as this blog goes, the thing I’m happiest about is that for the most part I’ve been able to keep a steady schedule, in part thanks to Illustration Friday. At the beginning of this year I committed to posting something every week based on the IF topic. I didn’t quite make that, but given my horrid track record for diary-keeping I’m amazed I did as well as I did.

Out of 52 weeks in the year:

• I posted IF illustrations for 43 of them (only missed 9, although technically a couple didn’t make it to the blog in time to post on IF)
• 39 of those were new, original drawings, three of which never got further than a rough sketch.
• 14 were existing work I’d done for another purpose but were appropriate for that week’s topic (and one of those was significantly edited for IF)

I’m pretty happy with that. The hardest part was getting back into the habit when I missed a whole month over the summer due to my insane schedule.

I don’t know if I can make the same vow this year, since I may have more illustration projects coming in. However, I do promise to post something to this blog every week, and participate in IF when I can. I’m also going to start merchandising my existing art more, making better use of my redbubble account and my CafePress store, and making more art that is directly in line with that. Toward that end I’d like to redo my website (including this blog!) but that’s a secondary priority to making more art.

Is anyone else making an “art resolution” this year?