Category Archives: Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Canned

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 Canned - Sketch

I got a little overly-ambitious with this week’s Illustration Friday topic, so the drawing is still only at the sketch stage, but I was just so tickled by the idea I couldn’t help myself! (Plus some of my drawing time was eaten up by the arrival of the new Girl Genius book…) Who wouldn’t like to have a pantry full of canned gremlins, bottled genies, and vacuum-packed-pixies. Even I don’t know what she’s got in some of those jars… but she’s clearly been very busy! Click the image to enlarge it.

All of my drawings go through a stage like this: I’m tightening up the composition, working out the perspective, and figuring out as many of the details as I can in pencil so that when I get to the inks I can just concentrate on building textures with the ink lines. Thanks to my light table I can scribble as much as I want with the pencil and not have to worry about marring the surface of the paper for the inks. Sometimes I’ll paste in elements or photocopy them and move them around until I’m happy, or use an overlay of tracing paper to establish the shading and lighting without obliterating the linework — some drawings have so many layers of tracing paper on the sketch they become difficult to transfer over to bristol for inking. Right now I’m thinking I need to do something else with the lower left corner before it’s ready (maybe move the edge of the table? Or maybe that little guy in the front needs a buddy…) but I’ll have to sleep on it.

Gonna try and finish the inks over the weekend, I’ll post them as soon as  I can!

Illustration Friday: Enough

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Feast

… or really, more than enough! My rather liberal interpretation of this week’s Illustration Friday topic is one from my archives, but I’ve never used it for anything. The project it was drawn for mutated into a different format before I finished this particular drawing. One of these days I will have to scan it and finish it nicely, because I’ve always liked it, but at the moment I just have this rather poorly-shot photo to share. (click to enlarge!)
This piece is trickier than usual to scan, partly because of its size (16×20) and partly because it’s drawn on clayboard instead of paper. Although the texture is a dream to draw on with crowquills, and highlights can be scratched out like scratchboard, I can’t use my light table to trace onto it like I can with sheets of bristol — had to break out the carbon paper! And because it’s inflexible it doesn’t scan as easily on my home scanner. Also, it’s far more expensive than the bristol, but probably worth it for a very special project.

Illustration Friday: Foggy

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Pause in the Shadows

This week’s Illustration Friday topic is a tricky one for me — I was stumped for something metaphorical, and I haven’t drawn atmospheric effects in a while. Then I remembered this old image which I made a while back for a school project but never really felt happy with. Just add fog: Viola! It’s not perfect, but I think it helped give the picture the depth it was lacking before. Doesn’t do anything for the figures, unfortunately!  Click the image to enlarge it.

The character is from a story rattling around in my head. She’s slipped out in bits and pieces of prose over the years, one of these days she’ll escape entirely…
The drawing itself is from several years ago, when I was still developing my current method of coloring. It’s fascinating to me sometimes to look at how I used to structure my files.  It seems like every few years I change my tactics. I guess it’s partly an evolution of my method, and partly due to the relentless march of software upgrades. (I always seem to switch the way I organize my file archives every few years too… amazing how something that made perfect sense five years ago can seem silly now! )

Illustration Friday: Fierce

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The Fierce One

Our little cat used to pounce the big cat all the time. It really confused him, he wasn’t sure what to make of this little monster almost half his size. These days it’s just as likely that he deliberately sits right in front of her twitching his tail like a lure to provoke a wrestling match which he is sure to win. I get far too much entertainment in the morning watching them face off like a pair of wrestlers, paws outstretched, each waiting for the other to make the first move. (Hint, it’s usually the little one!)

This is a super-quick scribble for this week’s Illustration Friday topic. I’m not very happy with it and wish I had something better to post right now (one of those times when I totally failed to capture the pencil sketch in the inks and need to redraw it) but there’s no time: I’m getting ready to go to ICON5 tomorrow! It was very last-minute, so I couldn’t get away from work in time for today’s sketchcrawl, but I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll have some better sketches to post when I get back!

Illustration Friday: Hoard

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The Hoard

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?

Forgotten, take 2

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The Forgotten

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.

Illustration Friday: Forgotten

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Forgotten

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.

Illustration Friday: Baby

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Baby

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.