Monthly Archives: April 2008

Illustration Friday: Primitive

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Primitives

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!

Illustration Friday: Fail

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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

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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: Homage

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An Appointment Kept
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.

Detail from “An Appointment Kept”

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.