Scribbles and Scribings

Ever since we got our second cat, it seems like she always is the one to end up with all the toys… Just another quicky for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, click to enlarge.

The original drawing is fairly small, about 3-by-4 inches. Oddly, I was doodling my sketches when I realized I was drawing a “horde” instead of a “hoard” and I had to go back and check my e-mail to see which was right. But it gave me an idea for another drawing, which is part of the purpose, right?

So, for last week’s Illustration Friday topic I ended up posting a very lame cell-phone-camera photo of a slightly lame scribble. Well, here it all is a bit cleaned up and looking more like the thing that was in my head when I was drawing it. Click image to enlarge.

Nothing can quite erase the fact that it was a hasty ball-point ink drawing on a rather crumpled piece of paper, but in this case I think it adds to the charm… and the theme.

Ah, so many possibilities for this week’s Illustration Friday topic. Too bad I’m usually terrible at telling jokes, so I went for the classic standby of slapstick.  As usual, click to enlarge.

Yes, this week not only a brand new drawing, but with a background and color too! This one was pretty quick, for me. Gotta love simple patterns sometimes.

A very quick scribble for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, drawn with ballpoint on a scrap of paper I had in my purse while I was waiting for someone. Sorry about the really bad picture quality; the scanner’s not hooked up and I’d lent my camera to a friend for the weekend so all I had was the camera on my cell phone. I’ll repost a better image when I can!

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a better version of this, you can find it here.

A relatively quick drawing for this week’s Illustration Friday topic: a baby elephant! Samson the baby elephant, as a matter of fact. Visitors to my blog may remember a previous subject was our zoo’s pregnant elephant Felix. Well, Felix is now a mommy, and Samson had his public debut a few weeks ago. He’s a real cutie! Click the picture to enlarge.

Pardon any poor image quality; I was a bit rushed so to accommodate a looser style I used paper larger than can fit in my scanner and had to do my best with a photograph. I suspect that one of my first major business purchases will have to be a larger scanner, it’s terribly inconvenient having to outsource that part of it. Unfortunately, decent scanners that can take 11×14 and bigger paper are rather expensive so it’ll have to wait a bit longer.

So, I feel a little bit cheesy about being absent for a month and then uploading another archive piece for this week’s Illustration Friday topic… and yet, that’s what I’m doing! This is just one panel from a short, 7-page story I wrote and illustrated a few years ago titled Feline Dreams. The drawing was particularly rushed in this panel but it definitely embodies “worry” to me — when I was drawing it I was really worried about finishing in time!

Here’s the full page this scene is from, click ‘em to see ‘em larger:

This is one of the series where I really hope my source files are hidden in my CD archives, because they didn’t make the move between my old computer and my current one… As part of my much-needed website redesign I’m planning on making space for this and a couple other more narrative projects I’d done about that time.

As for my long absence, let’s just say that two out-of-state conferences PLUS my big vacation for the summer PLUS coming down with a severe case of the traveler’s plague during the little time I was home this past month pretty much made posting impossible for me. Starting this week I’m getting back into my routine - new artwork next week if it kills me!

Hey, actual new art for this week’s Illustration Friday topic! It’s always really striking how the things that seem so cutting edge in one decade are considered so archaic in the next. At work I was cleaning up a bit and finally got rid of my Jaz Drive, can’t believe we used to use those things. Then again, the space where my office is used to be a huge data tape storage room not all that long ago. It didn’t help (hurt?) that while I was drawing this I was watching the South Park episode about the Pioneer town re-enactors who refused to ever break character…

I was determined to draw something new before the month was out, even if it’s a little on the sketchy side. Especially since I’m not always at my best when drawing mechanical things. I was VERY tempted to raid the sketchbooks again, because there was a little robot character I used to draw all the time, but it probably would have taken about as long to find it as it did to draw this.

Not sure if I’ll be updating for next week, unless I can finish it over the weekend, and the next week looks unlikely too as I’ll be away at a business trip/vacation. But we’ll see!

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 (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.

Yeah, he failed. Big time.

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.