OK, so this is my first official cop-out for Illustration Friday It’s not that I don’t have ample source material for the word “Geeky” — I live with geeks, I work with geeks, my friends are geeks, and I’m one too — but another drawing project took up all my free time this weekend. This is an old piece from about 10 years ago, which sharp eyes will be able to tell based on the style of computer being used. It was done for work for a poster describing an overly-long computer process, and was created in Adobe Illustrator based on a pencil sketch I’d scanned. I think this was one of the pieces that convinced me how much I prefer inking on paper instead of in Illustrator. Wow, my style has changed a lot since then!

This quick drawing is for the Illustration Friday topic “Twist.” As an added twist, I decided to use my brush pen to ink this one instead of my usual fixed-width pens. I adore my Micron pens, and I still used them here for some of the finer details, but it can be a lot of work to get a vivid, organic line with them. The brush pen forces a somewhat looser approach, which takes a little getting used to since I’m out of practice. Maybe when I have time I’ll add a background and tidy up the details, but I’m very happy with the overall gesture and expression in this one.

My take for the Illustration Friday topic “Camouflage.” These are all found around my house; thinking about of it, most of them were gifts. The two that I actually got for myself have been gifts in a different sense.

I did a really quick coloring job on it, not 100% happy with how everything turned out but that’s how it goes. If I was going to really picky about it I would have used some photo reference while doing the drawing, since not all of my “models” were as cooperative as the others. 🙂

Well, this one’s a day late and a dollar short, but I was still getting my blog set up when this was the Illustration Friday topic of the week and the idea was sticking in my head so I had to get it out.

I may post a color version later; I have a pretty clear idea about what I want to do with it, but I ran out of time.

I was working on this one and the next image at the same time over the weekend; they took a few hours each. Honestly, I’d forgotten just how much fun it was to make something quick and simple but still a finished drawing as opposed to a sketch or a doodle. Working on my thesis the pieces were so large and time consuming it took at least 3-4 weeks to complete a single drawing. Those are very satisfying to do (there’s something meditative about spending 4 hours doing nothing but background foliage) but it can get a bit wearing after a while without something a bit lighter to work on to break it up.