And you think YOU have it rough when it’s “that time of the month”….

I drew this for a Halloween greeting-card exchange with some friends, but it also fits for this week’s Illustration Friday topic. Don’t eat too much candy tonight!

 It’s amazing sometimes how quickly things can shift from one extreme to another, isn’t it?

Just a very quick doodle for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, getting back into the habit. I’ve been doodling a lot of little monsters lately, must be the holidays. But I’m still working on adding detail to the drawing from last week, I think it will make a good portfolio piece when I’m done. I’ll take another photo this weekend to show the progress so far but I haven’t had as much time to work on it during the week as I’d hoped.

Hi! It’s been a while, but things have been quite busy lately. Still, I think I got a little overambitious when tackling this week’s Illustration Friday topic. My drawing is only about half-finished, but enough is done for me to feel comfortable posting. I’m going to finish it anyway, because I really like how it’s going, and I’ll post the updated version when it’s available. If you click to enlarge the image, you can see some of the pencil lines still there under the ink lines. It’s pretty clean because I traced it very lightly onto the bristol from my sketch drawing — I love using my light table. There’s a lot more shading and crosshatching to do before I’d consider it done.

My studio is finally usable again, but there are a lot of finishing touches left to go. I have a couple other drawing projects that have been waiting in line while the remodeling was going on, so I should have some more to post very soon.

This week’s Illustration Friday topic reminded me of something that happened with a friend of mine this summer. She just moved to a place where she could have a little backyard garden, which she’s been enjoying. It’s a rowhouse, and her next-door neighbors had set up some hummingbird feeders, so she’d also been enjoying watching the pretty birds come around.

One day she was watering her plants near that side of the yard, being very careful so as not to frighten the many hummingbirds that were at the feeders that day. Suddenly, one of them flew right up to her. She was both amazed and nervous as he stared her straight in the eye for a good long while. Wondering if he was going to attack her, as ridiculous as that seemed, she didn’t know what to do until finally the tiny bird flew away back to the other yard. We still don’t know why, but suspect it had to do with reflections on her glasses.

I used a little reference this week, but not too much. It’s not a very good likeness of my friend, I’m afraid, and the greenery is a bit more generic than usual, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out for a quicky. My light table and a lot of my reference material are packed up as I’m remodeling my art studio right now. The drawing was done on a small piece of bristol with Micron pens and the coloring was all done in Photoshop.

Excuse me for getting a bit fangirl for a moment, but while I was pondering this week’s Illustration Friday topic we were sitting down for a rare evening in front of the TV. We’re still working through the first season of Battlestar Galactica. Actually, I was more interested in drawing the senior Adama because Edward James Olmos has such an interesting face, but technically he’s the Commander so I drew his son Captain Adama instead. Just a relatively quick drawing from a photo.

I didn’t do any tracing, but I don’t usually work directly from a photograph like this. Athough I use photos a lot for reference, particularly when drawing a particular type of animal or specific bit of scenery, I usually end up straying pretty far from the source. I prefer to use photos to get a good enough feel for my subject that I can “pose” them however I like, but that’s a lot of work for such a quick portrait – and this one was pretty quick.

OK, I might be stretching this week’s Illustration Friday topic a bit, but it seems to fit! This is one from the archives, because I was working on another personal project this week, which I’ll be posting later. This was an academic piece where the assignment was to illustrate a traditional phrase (of our choice), working in paint on illustration board. I can’t say it’s one of my best works, I’m not as comfortable with paint as I am with ink and it’s from a time when I was still struggling with my total aversion to drawing backgrounds, but I still like it.

EDIT: Jason finally finished his own essay for this week’s topic!

Has anyone seen my keys? I swear I set them down just a second ago, where could they have gone? Aaarrrgh, this seems to happen every time I’m running late….

The idea for this week’s Illustration Friday topic came quickly — it happens to me ALL the time — and was drawn just as quickly. Not too happy with how it came out, but I wanted to get it posted, and time is short this week, as we just returned from vacation.

Once again this week, my husband has taken on the challenge of a short writing assignment of his own.

OK so I’m a little late for this week’s Illustration Friday topic.
We’re on vacation all week, but this one sparked an idea from a project I’ve been mullling around for a while so I felt really inspired to do something for it. No scanner, so it’s just a photo of the page, and I had to wait until we had an internet connection again to post it.

My husband has also written something extremely silly about the moon on his blog.

I’m not much of poetry reader… or writer. So I had to think a bit about this week’s Illustration Friday topic. All of the poems that I like, the ones which come to mind first, are the humorous ones. I had just about forgotten about this one, but when I was looking for ideas through the very cool Poetry Tool at PoetryFoundation.org — which lets you search for poems through a very simple interface by theme or by occasion or whatever — I rediscovered it. I remember seeing an animated version of this poem as a child and being fascinated by the imagry. I assume it was on Sesame Street but alas I couldn’t find it online.

I used the brush pen again this week, but no colors this time. Cringe at my lettering! I was working a bit larger than usual so here’s a detail shot:

I almost posted an older piece which I wrote and illustrated which isn’t technically a poem, but had particularly lyrical prose, until I came up with this idea. I may still post that piece, since it’s not online anywhere else right now.

My husband Jason is using the Illustration Friday topic for his writing, and has a humorous poem of his own as his entry for the week. If anyone knows of a similar informal venue for writers, let us know!

My inspiration for this week’s Illustration Friday topic comes from multiple sources:

I spent most of the weekend cleaning in my drawing studio. It was the first room I had to set up when we moved into our house almost three years ago. I was still in the MFA program and we moved the weekend before the semester began. I was so busy with school and the rest of the house that as long as I could reach my drawing desk I didn’t have time to do anything else with that room. As a result, there were lots of boxes which had been shoved in there without being opened, stacked up in the corners of the room and in the back of the closet. Going through all of this, I found many lost “treasures” I’d forgotten about or had been wondering where they were or didn’t even know I had in there.

To keep me company during this undertaking, I had the TV on. Discovery Channel was showing show after show about ancient Egypt and the modern researchers trying to learn about it. Watching all those people poking around in dusty tombs was something I could really relate to at the time.

Very simple coloring this week, but it’s not a bad effect. It’s not quite a self-portrait, but it’s close.

As an extra bonus this week, and probably most weeks, my husband will be using the Illustration Friday topic of the week to write a piece of short fiction. Please take a moment to enjoy his take on the theme “Discovery”